Latest news with #Goths
Euronews
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
It's not a phase: How to celebrate World Goth Day in Europe
Five, six, grab your crucifix - and Robert Smith, because World Goth Day has arrived. First suggested on a MySpace blog in 2009 by a UK-based Goth DJ known as 'BatBoy Slim', Goth Day has since become a global annual celebration where "the Goth scene gets to celebrate it's own being." via GIPHY While most Goths prefer to stay out of the spotlight (unless carrying a black parasol), World Goth Day keeps things appropriately dark and inviting, with a range of community-hosted events that span the week. The 22 May date was originally chosen to highlight a special set of musical subculture-focused shows on BBC Radio 6, then stuck ever since. And why not? From dark wave DJ sets in Poland, to a gothic clothes swap in Dublin; Black pizza in London, and a trip back to the subculture's 80s, 90s and 00s origins at a club night in Madrid — there are plenty of opportunities knocking at your coffin. Plus, it's a great way to support your local Goth gang. Alternatively, you could just draw the curtains, blare some Bauhaus and be your usual black-hearted self with extra pride. After-all, some Goths have faced genuine persecution and violence just for daring to be different - one devastating example being the 2007 murder of Sophie Lancaster, a 20-year-old Goth from the UK. "There are quite a few Goths who have fought damn hard to retain their identity despite peer pressure, family pressure and indeed, any pressure to conform," the World Goth Day organisers state. "And if you've gone to all that trouble to preserve what you believe is the 'real you', don't you think you owe it to yourself to shine for a day?" Chipped nail polish, dancing skeletons, synth wave, hair spray, black cats, 'Bela Lugosi Is Dead'. Neon leg warmers, glow bands, pastel chokers, septum piercings, coffin-shaped cat trees, posters of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. Goth is whatever you want it to be. There are no rules, baby! It's about breaking conventions and going against the bland, suffocating monotony of traditional societal expectations to spread your bat wings and express your truest, fang-bearing self. At its core, being Goth is about finding a curiosity and fondness for the things others find disturbing. From music to film to fashion to art, there's a focus on themes like melancholy, death, gore and rebellion, expressed through subversive aesthetics and lifestyle choices. The subculture's origins can be traced back to the UK's late 70s post-punk underground music scene, with record producer Martin Hannett notably describing the band Joy Division's music as 'Gothic' in 1979. It's a term that spread to encompass any bands with a certain melancholic sound. These included The Cure (even though Robert Smith would argue otherwise), Bauhaus, The Psychedelic Furs, Alien Sex Fiend and Siouxsie and the Banshees, to name but a few. Meanwhile, in America, deathrock emerged as a sort of sub-genre of Goth, similarly taking the anarchy ethos of punk music and immersing it in horror-inspired theatrics. While the 80s and 90s are still seen as Gothic hey days, it's a subculture that's managed to stick throughout the decades - albeit morphing into various subcategories such as 'Cybergoth' and 'Pastel Goth', which take inspiration from steam punk, BDSM, Lolita fashion etc to create new forms of contrasting expression within 'Trad Goth'. No longer a marker of only youth culture (although the #Goth has been used 4 million times on video sharing platform TikTok), many older adults that grew up being Goth are still putting on their studded leathers and setting their faces with white powder. Millennial Goths in particular have carved themselves a niche on YouTube, with 'Emily Boo' and 'Of Herbs and Altars' two of the most popular, sharing their looks and experiences within the scene and offering advice to "baby bats". While Mods and Rockers come and go, Goths are here to stay. And contrary to popular belief - they don't only wear black. via GIPHY You can celebrate wherever you want! Although official events are listed on the website for World Goth Day and are as follows: UK & Ireland 22 May: ACAB Celebrates World Goth Day - DJs, Alt Drag & Market (Dublin) 22 May: Cabinet Sinister Bite Me! At Lost Souls Pizza (London) 22 May: World Goth Day gig at O'Reilly's (Hull) 24 May: Goth Meet Up at The Ruin Bar and Kitchen (Birmingham) 25 May: Gothic Clothes Swap WGD at Pawn Shop (Dublin) Europe 23 May: Gothic ball at Klub UNDER (Belgrade, Serbia) 23 May: Bunkerleute Dark Underground Party at Waaiberg Event Hall (Leuven, Belgium) 23 May: World Goth Day celebrations at Emerald CLUB (Bucharest, Romania) 24 May: World Goth Day celebrations at the Undead Dark Club (Barcelona, Spain) 24 May: Spain Goth Day at Sala Pirandello I - II (Madrid, Spain) 24 May: Shadowplay Afterparty oficial IMAMX + WGD, at Paseo Del Pintor Rosales (Madrid, Spain) 24 May: Dark goth wave synth at Wydział Remontowy (Gdańsk, Poland) 24 May: (Un)Pure Session: World Goth Day Special at Vamptasia Club (Valencia, Spain) via GIPHY Well, if you insist. Here are some Gothic movie and music recommendations instead: 🖤📽️ Movies House of Usher (1960) — Dir. Roger Corman Eraserhead (1977) — Dir. David Lynch Hellraiser (1987) — Dir. Clive Barker Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) — Dir. Brian Yuzna The Crow (1994) — Dir. Alex Proyas Suspiria (2018) — Dir. Luca Guadagnino 🖤🎶 Music Bauhaus: 'In the Flat Field' (1980) Joy Division: 'Closer' (1980) Siouxsie and the Banshees: 'Juju' (1981) The Cure: 'Pornography' (1982) — bonus shout-out to The Cure's 'Songs Of A Lost World', which made our best-of 2024 albums list) Cocteau Twins: 'Head Over Heels' (1983) Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: 'Let Love In' (1994)
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Titus Andronicus review – Simon Russell Beale is sublime amid epic horrors
It is not just heads that roll in Shakespeare's bloodiest drama. Hands and tongues are chopped off and bodies are mutilated until they are mere meat, then cooked and fed to loved ones, as we follow the fortunes of Roman general Titus (Simon Russell Beale) after a triumphant campaign against the Goths. The killing of his first prisoner and the subsequent marriage of Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Wendy Kweh) to new emperor Saturninus (Joshua James) sets off a circuit of hate-fuelled violence that raises the ante at every turn. A metal grille around the stage for Max Webster's production suggests the imminent letting of blood. The first of the horrors – the dismembering of Tamora's son, limb by limb, even as she begs for mercy – takes place off stage, Greek-style. You hear his screams and the squelch of metal on flesh. But the blood-letting becomes explicit, and graphic, albeit with a surprising, stylised twist (which should not be given away). Despite the grand guignol, with body pile-ups of Jacobean proportions, the violence never seems gratuitous, and there is no overt sign of sexual degradation after Titus's daughter, Lavinia (Letty Thomas), is raped. Russell Beale is subtly sublime, capturing all of Titus's sides. He is the dutiful, dignified statesman, dressed in civvies rather than military attire, as he cedes the mantle of emperor to Saturninus (excellently arrogant), heroic with hope when he thinks he can save his sons from decapitation, but then the beady-eyed strategist when his tears have run out and he has set upon cold-blooded revenge. Yet Russell Beale makes him humane, too: he does not kill one son in the early scuffle involving Lavinia, who Saturninus wants to marry even though she is betrothed to his brother and enemy Bassianus (Ned Costello). And he is devastated when he fails to save her from the violence; the scene as father mourns his daughter's wounds marks a truly tragic point in the play. Joanna Scotcher's set and costume design have a similar monochrome starkness to Webster's recent Macbeth. The blood looks all the redder against it. It is skin-crawlingly creepy when hi-tech torture equipment, suspended from pulleys, is brought on and off the stage. A gothic soundscape is full of nerve-jangling rattles and screams (sound design by Tingying Dong, compositions by Matthew Herbert) but it gets more adrenalised, with added club beats, as the violence amps up. The modernity of this production – grey trousers and overcoats, frosted glass doors at the back – answers the question of why this play, with all its extravagant horrors, should be performed today. In its look it is reminiscent of contemporary torture chambers – from Bagram to Guantanamo to Syria and Iran. A pit into which bodies are pushed brings the chilling sense of a mass grave. The body parts brought on to the stage in plastic bags and sometimes handed to a horrified parent or sibling are alarmingly reminiscent of current footage from Gaza. This abject realism switches, in wordless interludes, to a kind of feverish psychological reality in which actors curl up and turn into a dark, growling, choreographed ensemble, snarling and stomping with arms dangling – more like creatures than human beings. When someone dies they resurrect themselves to join this shadow-world which, you realise, is both the manifestation of the animal aspect of humanity but also hauntings that fuel the cycle of revenge. In spite of its bloodbaths, it is a play that glitters with poetic richness. This presents a strange paradox: such horrors set against such lyricism. On one hand, there are Aaron (Natey Jones)'s articulations of absolute hate. On the other, a melancholy language of sacrifice, suffering and forbearance, as well as Titus's inquiries into the 'reasons for this turmoil'. The futility of the violence is made abundantly clear, as well as the chaos of the hate. It is for this that we watch Titus Andronicus, and it is immaculately set against the barbarism. Occasionally, in the first half, there were poor sight lines with actors blocking the central scene. But in all, this is an awesome production. At the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 7 June
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Titus Andronicus: Simon Russell Beale is superb in this beautiful, blood-soaked nightmare
Any time Simon Russell Beale tackles Shakespeare – his forte – it qualifies as a major event. But marvelling at his superlative Titus Andronicus, which brings him back to his alma mater, the RSC, I also can't help observing how his choice of roles itself has a zeitgeisty feel for major events. He played Timon of Athens amid the financial crisis, King Lear in the run-up to the EU referendum, and Prospero in The Tempest when it felt as if his valorised type of actor was entering a valedictory phase. With Titus, the Bard's most visceral play, Max Webster's revival lands in the Swan at a time when violence, reported and graphically relayed, is part of our quotidian reality. Of course, brutality is a human constant, but it's pressing in on us now from all sides. Furthermore, in the spectacle of a loyal Roman general suffering the dismemberment of his comfort and hope, as a result of tyrannical authority, the work speaks, as if with urgency, to the current mood of rupture between citizen and state. At 64, Beale is now a generation older than Brian Cox was when he gave a career-best, Olivier-winning account of the role for the RSC in 1988. While there's an attendant drop in martial machismo (not that this was ever Beale's calling-card), his elder-statesman air lends him a frail dignity that will be remorselessly shredded. Entering stooped in a grey overcoat, his Titus is the model of fixity, as if weighed by the cost of his campaigns (drenched in his sons' blood). His eyes widen in discreet disbelief when Joshua James's capricious emperor Saturninus seizes on his daughter Lavinia for himself and there's plain distress when this sick monster orders the release and elevation of those he has captured: chief among them Tamora, queen of the Goths (Wendy Kweh). The performance thereafter beautifully charts Titus' journey from self-containment to man wildly undone, to the point of madness – emerging as the masterchef of one's nightmares, in that notorious grisly banquet where he serves Tamora her pie-baked sons. The blood-letting can risk becoming a distracting circus in its own right. Webster – who orchestrates animalistic scampering movement, stylised horror and ritualised action – doesn't stint on sensation. With machinery deployed on automated overhead tracks, as if at an abattoir, here be men strung from hooks, a hand severed by a chainsaw, gore jetting all over the place and Letty Thomas's ravished Lavinia left tongue-less and hand-bereft. Oddly, it's the spurts of poetry, as if in redemptive answer to the inhumanity, that stay with you. As much as he catches the dark incidental comedy of Titus's numb stoicism, it's Beale's handling of the lyricism that brings a perverse smile of pleasure to the lips. And the verse-speaking is largely tremendous across the board, with Emma Fielding akin to an appalled witness as his sister Marcia (a neat gender-flip) and Natey Jones ferocious yet oddly forgivable – because so damned for the colour of his skin – as Aaron. Much to chew on, and heaps to applaud, but not for the easily queasy. Until June 7;
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
On this day: Goths flock to North Yorkshire seaside town for festival
On this day in 2024, the York Press reported that a North Yorkshire seaside town had been visited by Goths for a twice-yearly event. Hundreds defied the rain to attend Whitby's Goth Weekend, which ran from Friday, April 26 to Sunday, April 28 that year. The festival offered live music and an alternative market with more than 100 stalls. Goths were also seen enjoying the town's cafes and pubs. The event began when Jo Hampshire invited 40 of her pen pals to The Elsinore Inn in 1994. Now, it is a global celebration of gothic culture, attracting visitors from far and wide. This year's (2025) first instalment of the Whitby Goth Weekend took place from Friday (April 24) to Sunday (April 27) last week.
BBC News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'We are doing gallons of blood': The ultra-violent Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint
Tragedy Titus Andronicus is the Bard's goriest work, and a new production is set to be one of the most extreme takes on it yet. It raises the question: why do we watch such brutality? Good theatre has the power to really move us – a statement that's usually taken metaphorically, rather than literally. Yet when it comes to Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, its impact can be so visceral it causes audience members to faint. I should know: while reviewing a production at Shakespeare's Globe in London, back in 2014, its disturbingly violent scenes caused me to start to feel light-headed, even while safely sat down in my seat. Unfortunately, it was a bench with no back: before the end of the first half, I had fainted away completely, falling backwards and waking up in a stranger's lap. Warning: this article contains some graphic descriptions of violence And I was far from the only person to have such a full-bodied response to Lucy Bailey's production of this gory revenge tragedy: the press went wild for stories of "droppers", with more than 100 people fainting during the run – testament to the immense power of Shakespeare's writing, and the skill of performers, as well as to the props department's handling of litres of fake blood. One of the Bard's earliest plays, written in 1591-2, and almost certainly his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus is a story of violent vengeance: Titus, a general of Rome, returns from wars against the Goths with their queen, Tamora, and her sons held as captives. When her eldest son is sacrificed by Titus, Tamora swears revenge – setting in motion a series of increasingly brutal acts that ends with an infamous scene involving the baking of pies... Boasting 14 deaths, it is the most violent of all Shakespeare's plays – and now it's back on stage, with a new production opening at the UK's Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Its fluctuating reputation The play's unavoidable ultra-violence has meant that, for much of the performance history of Shakespeare – whose birthday is today – Titus Andronicus was considered a bit of an embarrassment, a bloody stain on his reputation: too gruesome, too over-the-top, to be considered in the same category of greatness as, say, Hamlet or Othello. Then there's its sometimes queasy tone: the excesses can tip Titus into a gleefully macabre, manic comedy (an aspect also embraced in Bailey's gore-fest). Let's just say, the Victorians were not fans. But the play's reputation began to revive in the second half of the 20th Century. At the Royal Shakespeare Company alone, there have been several seminal productions in the past 70 years, starring Laurence Olivier (1955), Patrick Stewart (1981), Brian Cox (1987) and David Bradley (2003), while Anthony Hopkins playing Titus on screen in Julie Taymor's influential, blackly funny film version in 1999 also surely helped boost the play's standing. Some of these productions leaned heavily on the horror, too: there were fainters and walk-outs in Deborah Warner's unflinching 1987 production, which Cox once claimed was the most interesting play he'd done and the best stage performance he'd ever given. But he also pointed to the odd humour of the play, calling it "a young man's play… full of energy, joie de vivre and laughter that often strikes people as ludicrous". Titus is not always staged with grisly literalness: in the Olivier-starring production by Peter Brook, the mutilation of Titus's daughter Lavinia was famously suggested with stylised red streamers – an aestheticised approach also used in the Japanese Ninagawa Company's production in the 2000s. More recently, Jude Christian's all-female 2023 production in London's candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse enacted the violence on candles themselves, with cast members stabbing, snapping or snuffing them. In the latest production of Titus Andronicus, however, there will be blood. Buckets of it. "We are doing gallons of blood. We've made a sort of wet room [on stage], it's got a drainage system and an abattoir hook…" says Max Webster, the play's director, over a video call from Stratford-upon-Avon. He's had to figure out how to stage no fewer than 27 different acts of onstage violence, from punches through to limbs being lopped off and tongues being cut out. And the only limit on the amount of gore sloshing around is the practical question of how to clean it up between scenes. "It's an unbelievably boring thing about how many crew members and squeegees it takes," laughs Webster. "In one sentence, you're thinking 'what is the meaning of tragedy in relation to human nature?' – and then very quickly you get into 'how many mops can the crew hold?'." Webster, whose acclaimed productions include an adaptation of Booker Prize winner Life of Pi and a recent David Tennant-starring Macbeth, wanted to direct Titus Andronicus for one simple reason: Simon Russell Beale, one of Britain's greatest Shakespearean actors, asked him to. Titus was a part that Russell Beale fancied a crack at, and the RSC was happy to oblige. This version is updated – set in a crisp, besuited modern world riven by conflict, although where exactly is kept deliberately vague. "It's trying to be open – we're not setting it in Kosovo or Gaza or Sudan," says Webster, adding swiftly "And we're not going to try to produce the US army onstage or something – it's trying to make sense of Rome as a 'superpower of empire' rather than as 'the United States of America'." Still, he sees Titus as freshly, troublingly relevant, in light of shocking events such as the 7 October Hamas attacks, the war in Gaza, and the sudden invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine, the story's extreme violence doesn't seem so unimaginable. In this production, the violence is certainly no laughing matter. In rehearsals, they have been playing it entirely seriously, and eschewing the blackly cartoonish or stylishly Tarantino-esque approach to the violence that some directors explore. This has risks: Webster fully expects that, when the show is in front of an audience, there may be some nervous laughter; it'll be their job in previews to figure out where these laughs form a necessary "pressure release valve", and where they're really just a sign to make the show even more harrowing. For Webster, it isn't possible to laugh at the brutality of Titus Andronicus in 2025 – it's too real. He sees the play as "a howl of pain"; watching it becomes an act of witness, an attempt to face up to atrocities taking place right now – something that he acknowledges could be hard for an audience. "I can walk down the Avon [river], and know my family is safe and it doesn't feel like the world is burning. But you look at other parts of the world… these horrors, that maybe feel historical to us, are actually happening." The psychology behind violent entertainment But Titus Andronicus isn't a documentary; it's an old play, that people choose to stage and choose to pay to go to see. So why, when we could just watch the news, do we opt to watch such harrowing content as art, as entertainment? It's a question that partly motivated Russell Beale to do Titus, he told The Guardian last week: "I don't understand the violence. I don't understand why as an audience we feel excited, stimulated, challenged by it; it's so relentless." It may have been shunned in later centuries, but Titus Andronicus's original audiences loved it – and many other forms of graphically horrible entertainment, from bear baiting to public hangings. Titus was a hit in Elizabethan England, and in writing it Shakespeare may, in fact, have been playing to the crowd: it resembles the super-violent revenge tragedies that were popular at the time, rarely-staged works such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy. Such plays were, themselves, drawing inspiration from the incredibly bloody and outrageous tragedies written by Seneca in the First Century AD – including Thyestes, a source of direct inspiration for Shakespeare, where the title character is fed a pie made of the flesh of his own children. And obviously, Ancient Greek tragedies – even if they keep acts of violence off-stage – are a rich and enduring source of creative murders of family members and cycles of bloody revenge. Such tragedies, Webster points out, had their origins in ritual performances of sacrifice. "I guess theatre came out of killing goats in Ancient Greece… there's always been some relationship between theatre and violence and the sacred stuff." More like this:• Edward II: Did a gay love affair spark a royal crisis?• The Shakespeare words you don't know you know• The Shakespeare tragedy that speaks to us now It does seem that watching the very worst things imaginable unfolding has an irresistible appeal – not only do we still return to Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, but we've also turned death and violence into major sources of entertainment, apparently appropriate for daily consumption. Horror films, true crime podcasts, police procedurals, first-person shooter video games… depictions of very, very bad things happening to bodies are pervasive across all art forms, all the time. You might even say we're addicted to the adrenaline shot we get from such emotionally-wringing, extreme forms of entertainment: research shows that the blood-pumping, heart-racing high we get from fear is close to the pleasurable bodily experience of excitement. From the high body count of fantasy shows like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon to the dystopian chills of Squid Game to the seemingly endless appetite for the torture porn movies of the Saw franchise, much of our creative output would make Seneca smack his lips in approval. But beyond the potential physical thrills, why are we so drawn to watching such violent content? When I ask Webster, he's as unsure as Russell Beale. "The truth is, I don't know. But there is a lust to watch violence on-stage – it is a basic human urge." He wonders if it forms a safe outlet for our innate human darkness. And a common theory as to why we enjoy the terrors of a horror movie or the bleakness of a dystopian novel is just this: that such fictional outings are a secure way for us to rehearse terrible acts – without ever having to experience those in real life. "Maybe it is so we don't have to do [violence] in our lives?" Webster ponders. "We all have these weird, dark, turbulent fantasies that we don't talk about because they're not socially acceptable… so maybe seeing it on-stage is an escape, or a relief?" The academics Haiyang Yang and Kuangjie Zhang confirm Webster's theory, sharing research in the Harvard Business Review that found that horror entertainment "may help us (safely) satisfy our curiosity about the dark side of human psyche… As an inherently curious species, many of us are fascinated by what our own kind is capable of. Observing storylines in which actors must confront the worst parts of themselves serves as a pseudo character study of the darkest parts of the human condition." If I'm honest, the news that there's so much blood in Webster's Titus Andronicus that they need a drain on stage has got me nervous of watching the show, rather than gleefully ready to excise my inner demons. Is he worried that this Titus might be so powerful – so bloody, and so upsetting – that people will faint? He is not. "It's important you provide a content warning, and then people can make an informed decision about if they want to see it," says Webster. "If people faint, they faint." Titus Andronicus is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 17 June Holly Williams novel The Start of Something is out in paperback now -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
