Latest news with #MihaelaBodlovic
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Explainer: Why did the Edinburgh book festival move?
Nearly 700 events have just been announced for its 2025 programme, which will include award-winning stars of stage and screen, along with best-selling authors, broadcasters, politicians, sporting celebrities, stand-up comics and musicians. Read more: An overall audience of more than 100,000 is expected to events ranging in size from intimate gatherings for just a few dozen people around the historic NHS campus, which is now home to the Edinburgh Futures Institutes, to the 1000-capacity galas at the McEwan Hall. The Edinburgh International Book Festival was staged for three years at Edinburgh College of Art. (Image: EIBF) Other events will be staged at the nearby National Library of Scotland and Dynamic Earth, the science centre on the doorstep of the Scottish Parliament. The 2025 festival will be a far cry from its earliest incarnation, which was conceived as a one-off event when it was staged in 1983, when there were only two other literary festivals in the UK. The McEwan Hall hosts the biggest events in the Edinburgh International Book Festival programme. (Image: Mihaela Bodlovic) But that first edition was seen as a huge success thanks to appearances from the likes of Anthony Burgess, John Updike, PD James and Melvyn Bragg. Other authors invited to the city by founding director Jenny Brown included Doris Lessing, William McIlvanney, Liz Lochhead, Joan Lingard and Malcolm Bradbury. The Edinburgh International Book Festival is now mostly staged at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. (Image: Chris Scott) The festival would return every two years until 1997, when it became an annual fixture due to its growing popularity in Charlotte Square Garden. By the turn of the century, the book festival was playing host to 350 authors in Charlotte Square and the event played a huge part in Edinburgh being named the world's first UNESCO City of Literature in 2004. Growing visitor numbers and pressure to reduce the impact of the event on the privately-owned garden led to the event expanding onto George Street for the first time. Although the festival had resisted calls from heritage campaigners to consider relocating the event, they agreed to do exactly that in 2021, when the event returned following the lifting of Covid restrictions, with a small-scale festival staged at Edinburgh College of Art. The following year festival director Nick Barley sprung a surprise with an announcement that a long-term agreement had been reached with Edinburgh University to stage the event at the new Edinburgh Futures Institute in future. Another two editions of the festival were staged at the art school before the literary celebrated took over the former hospital site last August, weeks after the university's revamp was unveiled, under a new director, Jenny Niven. She announced a new partnership with long-time Fringe promoters and producers Underbelly to allow the biggest events with authors to go ahead at the McEwan Hall, where former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, stage and screen star Ruth Jones, Gavin & Stacey co-creator Ruth Jones and Scottish football favourite Ally McCoist.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'A riot': Jane Austen stage adaptation with karaoke opens tonight
It's the 1800s and it's party time in Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), the Olivier Award winning West End triumph opening in Southampton tonight (Tuesday June 10) as part of the city's Jane Austen 250 celebrations. The unique and audacious retelling of Jane Austen's most iconic love story will be at Mayflower Theatre until Saturday. Men, money and microphones will be fought over in this irreverent but affectionate adaptation featuring a string of pop classics including Young Hearts Run Free, Will You Love Me Tomorrow and You're So Vain. (Image: Mihaela Bodlovic)READ MORE: We tried Southampton's 'best' bottomless brunch - this was our verdict Playwright Isobel Macarthur said: "I had a 50p copy of the novel from the second-hand bookshop below my flat in Glasgow. I assumed it would be completely unrelatable, but how wrong I was. The original book is a riot, a dynamic rom com, and Austen is a right laugh! "This adaptation, which is told by the servants, using karaoke, is in the spirit of her. It's funny, feminist and front footed. "A two-week run was originally planned back in 2018. So to be still doing it now is proof that audiences respond to generous entertainment and that all-female casts with regional accents don't detract from historical or literary pieces but, rather, enhance them." Tickets from (Image: Mayflower Theatre)
Scotsman
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Theatre reviews: The Mountaintop
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... The Mountaintop, Lyceum Theare, Edinburgh ★★★★★ Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★ When Katori Hall's breakthrough play The Mountaintop first appeared in London in 2009, Barack Obama had just been elected as the first black President of the United States; and if the young playwright struggled, at first, to find a US producer, it was perhaps because its sometimes apocalyptic tone seemed out of time, at that moment of hope. The Mountaintop | Mihaela Bodlovic Flash forward 16 years, though, to the age of Trump, and this brilliant, visionary and disturbing play could hardly seem more timely, as it imagines the last night on earth of mighty civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King, and a strange encounter between him and a hotel maid at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis; the place where King was shot dead, on his hotel balcony, on 4 April 1968. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now, the play is being revived at the Lyceum in a challenging farewell show programmed by outgoing artistic director David Greig; and Rikki Henry's bold production rises to the occasion with a thrilling 95 minutes of theatre, bold, breathless, and sometimes terrifying. The Mountaintop | Mihaela Bodlovic As the play begins, Caleb Robert's Dr King is arriving back at his room in a thundering rainstorm, after a Memphis strike rally. Nervy and driven, and coughing with laryngitis, he huddles in a blanket, trying to pen a speech titled 'America is going to hell.' It's only when a pretty, flouncily-dressed maid called Camae arrives with his coffee that some light begins to fall on Hyemi Shin's high, heavily tilted hotel room set; yet as King begins to flirt with her, it soon becomes clear that their encounter is not following any ordinary route. With an unexpected authority, Shannon Hayes's brilliant Camae both laughs and giggles like any young girl meeting a hero, and looks past the routine sexual overtones of his chat to see a man both physically exhausted, and terrified by the constant death threats he receives. And as the thunder rolls, and Pippa Murphy's superb soundscape gathers momentum, she both challenges and comforts him, until he begins to realise that she is much more than a chambermaid, and that he is facing the moment he has feared for so long. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It might be possible to argue with some aspects of Hall's handling of the play's final phase, which involves a comic phone chat with God (female, of course), and a lightning journey through the last 60 years of racial politics in the US. By the end, though, the show achieves a dark and stunning intensity, as we watch Caleb Roberts's complex, heartrending King being dragged unwillingly from life; not kicking and screaming, but - to the very last - shaping those visionary words of hope and freedom that ensure his legacy lives on, even in the worst of times. Lear | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan There's an equal darkness and intensity, too, in Ramesh Meyyappan's Lear, a wordless hour-long meditation on Shakespeare's great tragedy, commissioned by last month's Singapore International Festival of Arts, and produced by Raw Material, with the National Theatre of Scotland. Driven by a terrific score by David Paul Jones, and set on a dark stage strewn with sack-cloth and ashes by designer Anna Orton, this Lear features astonishing performances from Nicole Cooper, Amy Kennedy and Draya Maria as Lear's three daughters, dressed in dark red, scarlet and blue silk; and revolves around Ramesh Meyyappan's intense and heartbreaking central vision of Lear as a man accustomed to power, but now increasingly lost and demented. That this short show can convey so much in a brief hour, not only of the play itself but of 21st century responses to it, is a tremendous tribute to the quality of the cast, of the creative team, and of Orla O'Loughlin's immaculate, flowing direction; and of course, to Ramesh Meyyappan himself, performer and creator, and now surely Scotland's leading artist in the world of theatre that reaches beyond language, to touch our hearts and souls. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Scotsman
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Keli, Edinburgh review: 'magnificent'
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... Keli, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★ Ten days, and two new shows about the scars left by Scotland's mighty coal industry, and its bitter end in the miners' strike that was called off 40 years ago this spring. The first was Sylvia Dow's Blinded By The Light, premiered in Bo'ness last week; and now, here comes the National Theatre of Scotland's Keli, a bigger and even more theatrically ambitious exploration of very similar themes, built around the brass band music that was such a vital part of mining communities' lives, and written and composed by Martin Green of the acclaimed Scottish-English band Lau, whose company Lepus co-produces the show. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Liberty Black in Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic Like Blinded By The Light, Keli sets up an interaction between a younger generation living with the aftermath of coal, and those involved in the industry decades ago; but whereas Dow places her two time frames in parallel, Keli goes boldly for the more surreal option of bringing past and future face to face. Its heroine, Keli, is a fierce 17-year old girl growing up in a former mining town half-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her language is ear-poppingly obscene, and her life desperately stressful, with her mother suffering a long-term mental breakdown that makes it almost impossible for Keli to juggle her home commitments with both college and her rubbish part-time shop job. Keli, though, also has a gift. She is a brilliant horn player, the best her local brass band - a long-term survivor of the mining era - has ever seen; and her life reaches crisis point when she is chosen to play a supremely difficult horn solo at a major UK competition in the Albert Hall. It's on her return from this traumatic trip to London that, through a bruising chain of events, she suddenly finds herself underground, talking to a 20th century man who should be dead, but whose life as an acclaimed horn player in the band both mirrors and contrasts with her own. Keli | Mihaela Bodlovic All of this is handled in brave and spectacular style in Green's play, many years in development, and based on what was once a lockdown audio drama. The story has a flashback structure which places Keli's conversation with the man from the past, one William Knox, front and centre; while the events and stresses that lead to their encounter emerge from the darkness around them, on Alisa Kalyanova's powerful underground cavern of a set. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Martin Green's music, directed on stage by Louis Abbott, is quite extraordinary, sometimes played live on stage by brass musicians Andrew McMillan and Hannah Mbuya with support from the cast, sometimes involving a full and glorious brass band (either Whitburn Youth Band or Kingdom Brass), and sometimes integrated into George Dennis's powerful sound design; but always combining the familiar harmonies and strains of brass band music with passages where those sounds refract and shatter, spinning off into aural images of chaos and breakdown. Director Bryony Shanahan orchestrates all these elements to perfection, in the edgy, bold-brush-stroke style Keli's story demands; and the five-strong acting cast rise to the challenge magnificently, with Liberty Black heartbreakingly raw, angry and quick-witted as Keli, and Karen Fishwick superb as her broken Mum, among other roles. A beautiful metaphor to do with pressure runs through the show; a reflection on the pressures suffered by miners then and Keli now, and how extreme air pressure from the lungs - harnessed by brass players - can help build something beautiful, what Keli calls great cathedrals of sound. And the play also captures how those pressures were and are entangled with questions of class, even in an age of individualism bereft of the political solidarity and high moral aspirations that gave William Knox's generation hope; leaving survivors like Keli with only the band music, celebrated in the play's glorious finale, to offer them a glimpse of what might be possible, in a more humane and convivial world. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
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Scotsman
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Scottish Opera: The Merry Widow, Glasgow review: 'a dizzying theatrical tsunami'
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... Scottish Opera: The Merry Widow, Theatre Royal, Glasgow ★★★★ To appreciate this brazen new Scottish Opera production, nay re-envisioning, of Franz Lehár's 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, there's absolutely no place for preconceptions. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Gone are the fin-de-siècle Parisian glamour, haughty socialites and syrupy comedic intrigues of high society, to be replaced by the Mafia world of 1950s New York and Sicily, with all its hard-edged hierarchies, callous manipulation and a radical new translation (by director John Savournin and writing partner David Eaton) that blends acid cliches from The Godfather with the comic caricatures of, say, Bugsy Malone. Paula Sides (Hanna Glawari) in Scottish Opera's production of The Merry Widow | Mihaela Bodlovic The secret to Savournin and his team's success lies in the unrelenting self-belief of its delivery. A resounding flourish from the Scottish Opera Orchestra (lush, fiery and passionate under music director Stuart Stratford), accompanied by cinema-style credits, sets in motion a dizzying theatrical tsunami, an evening of hyperactive physicality, athletic characterisation and plenty of fine singing. Rarely has a Scottish Opera audience laughed so much, or so heartily. The cast buy into it entirely, not least the powerful frontline duo of Paula Sides, classy and compelling as wealthy widow Hanna, and Alex Otterburn, an ardently complex presence as Danilo. Henry Waddington's ruthlessness as Don Zeta, now a Mafia supremo, gains warmth through his calculated incompetence; Rhian Lois glistens as Valentina, his wayward wife. Alex Otterburn (Danilo) and Henry Waddington (Don Zeta) in Scottish Opera's production of The Merry Widow | Mihaela Bodlovic A menagerie of stereotypical hoodlums do their bidding, from Matthew Kellett's frenetic capo Nicky Negus to mobster duo Cascada (Christopher Nairne) and Briochi (Connor James Smith). William Morgan's lean tenor doesn't always pass muster as Rosillon, a mob-sponsored jazz singer. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Chorus are a spectacular riot, Kally Lloyd-Jones' choreography eye-catching, the sets by designer takis oozing colour, character and detailed opulence. At times, the dialogue can seem overlong, even repetitive, but sheer entertainment wins the day.
