Latest news with #Rum
Daily Mirror
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Coronation Street star tackles male suicide in theatre show inspired by friend's tragic death
Former Coronation Street actor Joe Mallalieu is on tour with his play RUM - a blistering new play about masculinity and male suicide, violence and vulnerability Former Coronation Street star performs monologue about male suicide Empty cans of Stella litter the stage, but Danny finds one unopened and drains it as he carries on his monologue, stepping over building debris and trapped by two unfinished walls. "I'm plastering stock, you see," he tells the audience, mixing plaster. "Building royalty. Dad's a spread. Granddad was a spread an' all six of his brothers, barring one who was a chef, and everyone said he w'posh. "So, it's fair to say that when it comes to this shit, it's in me blood." Across the ARC Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees there is a ripple of recognition from the 'pay-what-you-can' audience, on the opening night of 'RUM, a blistering new play about masculinity and male suicide, violence and vulnerability. A surprise hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, this is Adolescence for the generation before Andrew Tate. By the end, the eyes of more than one coal-built Teeside man are filled with emotion, as the darkest consequences of not being able to express feelings are played out. Danny is not just finishing the job his workmate left unfinished, he is supposed to be writing the speech for his best mate's funeral. Jase has taken his own life – and Danny is in danger of wasting his in a haze of cocaine, punch-ups and childhood memories he is trying to force down with cheap lager. "In 2021, I lost my mate Dillon," says former Coronation Street actor Joe Mallalieu, who wrote the play and holds the stage as Danny. "Dillon took his life. I keep thinking, 'was that moment him trying to say something to me?' Writing this was the thing that saved me." 'Rum' has a deep resonance in Teeside, which has long battled the unwanted label of 'suicide capital of the UK' – a place where 75 per cent of those taking their own lives are men. In the hope the play can provoke fresh conversations, Max Emmerson Productions has partnered with the charity Andy's Man Club which sees thousands of men chat over a brew on Monday nights in 270 towns and cities right across the UK. The only rule of Andy's Man Club is 'it's okay to talk'. "I met Dillon when I was 12," Joe, 33, says. "He joined me and my mates I'd known since I was five. When we were about 14, Dillon was fostered. We never really thought about why. We all stayed mates, we were each other's best men and godfathers. "Dillon used to get into fights. Sometimes being hard is all you have got, and Dillon got known as someone who never backed down. Not being able to be scared must be so bad. "It happened during lockdown. He'd got in trouble with the police, and he was afraid of going to prison. "When he took his life, he'd been on a bender. We'd been out a few days before, there's a video of us singing Oasis, that's why I put Oasis in the play. He was 28." Joe looks away. "I'm not writing to Dillon," he says, eventually. "I'm writing to lads. I'm not trying to write about building sites, that's just the trade I know – I'm writing to my class. The ones who are really struggling. Feeling stuck. Feeling like we're getting left behind. "It's hard to speak about this from any background, but it's especially hard from a working-class background. "The building trade is the worst for suicide. I remember being on a site wearing a harness and they said to me, the last person that wore that isn't here anymore. "Drugs are such a huge part of the building industry. Paid on Friday, skint on Sunday. What happened to all the other bits that used to be part of working-class culture, the music and the pigeon lofts? "I really wanted to say something with this about how we're struggling and why we're struggling – and how we could struggle a bit less if we were able to say a little bit more." The battle is not just for working class communities to speak, it's to be heard, Joe says. "My experience is that the people who commission drama have never wanted working class less," he says. At 16, Joe began a different path from his peers when he beat thousands of school pupils across the UK to land one of eight places on BBC reality documentary Mission Beach, where he trained as a 'Baywatch' lifeguard. At 24, he won a place at drama school, training at the former Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA). In 2018, he appeared in Coronation Street as Cormac Truman, the son of the drug-dealing Ronan Truman, with a dramatic overdose storyline. Stints on stage and soap followed, but in between, he always went back to plastering, the trade he'd learned as a kid from his father and grandfather. He was plastering royalty after all. "Being a working class actor, I was always the drug dealer or the person who dies of the drug overdose," Joe says. "So, I wanted Danny to be more than that. So much writing for TV and theatre sees us as two-dimensional characters. I wanted to write something that's more accurate to where I'm from. "I started going to acting when I was in a behaviour support unit. I'd been excluded from school for fighting many times. People used to come to my house in the evening and ask for a fight. "When I got a scholarship to acting college, I nearly didn't go. We didn't have the money to get to London, and you hear all these stories of people who had to change their accents." At acting school, Joe started reading more. "When I read The Grapes of Wrath it changed my life. I was always writing, but I didn't connect it. I'd always known plastering was this amazing metaphor and that lots of things about building are really beautiful. Imagine saying that on a building site? "Plaster cracks really easily. Things are always moving. Sites are full of stories. The story of Rum is Danny plastering over the cracks, but they just keep showing back through." For some of the men in the Stockton audience on opening night, it was their first time in a theatre. For others, it was the first time they'd seen themselves represented, by the paint, plaster and blood-spattered Danny. "This spoke true to me today," a man wearing an Andy's Man Club shirt tells Joe after the show. "We plaster over the cracks, we all wear a mask. We don't know how to ask for help." Joe nods. "It's scary to take the mask off," he says. "I'm still putting one on. Try doing a play and then going back on a building site." He laughs, then shakes his head. "Male suicide is as high as it is because of all the years these stories haven't been important. And that's what I'm trying to change."
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
LHV Group's Terms for Own Shares Acquisition
The Supervisory Board of AS LHV Group, based on the authorisation granted by the General Meeting of shareholders held on 26 March 2025, approved the following terms for the acquisition of LHV Group's own shares: The maximum volume of acquisition is up to 3.3 million shares within one year; The acquisition price per share must not exceed: (i) the average market price over the last 30 trading days by more than 50%, and (ii) the closing price on the previous trading day on Nasdaq Tallinn; The authorised agent for the transactions is AS LHV Pank, acting independently and on a market-based basis; All transactions, including shareholder-initiated block trades, will be executed on the regulated market Nasdaq Tallinn; The acquisition may commence on the date of this announcement; Summary data (daily volume and weighted average price) will be disclosed no later than on the seventh trading day after the transaction, and be made available to the Estonian Financial Supervision and Resolution Authority, via the Nasdaq Tallinn system, and on LHV Group's investor website. LHV Group is the largest domestic financial group and capital provider in Estonia. LHV Group's key subsidiaries are LHV Pank, LHV Varahaldus, LHV Kindlustus, and LHV Bank Limited. The Group employs over 1,160 people. As at the end of March, LHV's banking services are being used by 465,000 clients, the pension funds managed by LHV have 113,000 active customers, and LHV Kindlustus is protecting a total of 174,000 clients. LHV Bank Limited, a subsidiary of the Group, holds a banking licence in the United Kingdom and provides banking services to international financial technology companies, as well as loans to small and medium-sized Rum Communications Manager Phone: +372 502 0786 Email:
Telegraph
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Could this become the Glyndebourne of ballet?
'How would you feel about me doing a ballet in your garden?' This was the question, Matt Brady asked Lady Holly Rumbolt, whose home, Hatch House in Wiltshire, is set in exquisite grounds that include a 17th-century Dutch walled garden. Her reply was swift: 'Oh my God, I love it! Let's go find Rum!'' Rum, it turned out, was not a celebratory tipple but her husband Sir Henry Rumbold – who, luckily, was as taken with the idea as she was. And so, just a few months later, in September 2009, the inaugural Ballet Under the Stars took place: traditional ballets were stirred in with contemporary works (Brady has overseen the creation of more than two-dozen new pieces in the past 16 years), all of them performed by world-class dancers, and with a scrummy dinner served in between 'acts'. Given the country-house setting and the smart dress code, you could describe Ballet Under the Stars as Glyndebourne for ballet lovers, albeit on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, Brady's empire is growing, and his latest venture, 'Iconique', has broadened out his vision first to Dubai and then to Nassau, capital of the Bahamas. 'When we first did Hatch House,' says Brady, 'the total budget was £7,500, for one night. And now we're in excess of £400,000, for four nights there, and over £500,000 in Nassau, for two.' Brady, 53, is certainly not some fly-by-night impresario. He was born into an artistic family; his mother is the historical novelist Charlotte Bingham, his father was the actor and writer Terence Brady; Violetta Elvin, his godmother, was a chief rival of Margot Fonteyn's in the Royal Ballet's early days. A Gene Kelly fan as a child, Brady would go on to spend 15 years in the film business, during which, at 30, he was suddenly fully bitten by the dance bug and found himself seeing two or three things a week for five years. 'I immersed and educated myself in the art form to the point of obsession.' He founded the impresarial Covent Garden Dance Company in 2006, while the catalyst for Ballet Under the Stars was a dance-and-dinner evening he organised at a small venue in Bruton, Somerset, featuring Royal Ballet stars Laura Morera and Ricardo Cervera. 'Laura and Ric reduced the audience to tears,' he says, 'and they threw flowers off the mezzanine balcony. I thought, this is great!' I am lucky enough to see the most recent fruits of Brady's labours. One perfectly still Saturday evening in the grounds of Nassau's impossibly plush Fort Bay Club, a little over 350 snazzily dressed diners (including, the Connerys: Sean's widow Micheline, and his son Jason and wife Fiona) are watching Royal Ballet star Lauren Cuthbertson and former New York City Ballet principal Robbie Fairchild perform superstar choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour. Uplit coconut palms line the back of the stage, and behind those, powdery white sand leads down to the gently lapping sea. Idyllic, yes, but Brady is at pains to tell me that, sometimes, there is trouble in paradise. 'Whenever you do live theatre,' he says, 'there are always challenges. This year, we've had a torn meniscus, a little bit of food poisoning. We've had costumes [for an excerpt of Balanchine's Diamonds] made in Brazil that were sent three weeks ago, but unfortunately, apparently due to Mardi Gras and Carnival, the Brazilian police wanted to inspect a tutu.' So they've impounded a tutu? He grins. 'I think they've been using it in carnival and we'll get it back when they're finished with it. So, we had to get a replacement hand-delivered from New York. Then, I woke up this morning to be told that the 'theatre' had been emptied – 360 chairs, and all the tables. There's been a lot,' he says with a faint sigh, and he might have added that he had to change the running-order on the second night because condensation risked turning the stage into a dangerous ice-rink, and also that his photographer had to slice up a ballet barre with a blowtorch because it was too high. As fun as it is, I can nevertheless imagine the Nassau venture raising heckles for some. After all, isn't this the noble art form of ballet being yanked about and parachuted in for the well-heeled minority of a small, far-from-rich country, while yielding little or nothing of either artistic or social use? Actually, not quite. For one thing, there is the quality of what's on offer. The dancers – who also include English National Ballet stars Fernanda Oliveira and Alejandro Virelles, rising Paris Opera star Seojun Yoon and former Alvin Ailey star (and proud Bahamian) Courtney Celeste Spears – are from the international top drawer. And not only are the choreographers generally at a similar level, three-quarters of the 12 works on offer are completely self-contained, with not one hackneyed excerpt from a 19th-century classic. But what of helping the wider Bahamian population? The event is conspicuously ritzy and exclusive, right down to the promo shoot I'm at on the Friday morning, which takes place not even on the (perfect) beach, but on an awe-inspiring three-mast, multi-million-pound yacht moored just off it, its sitting-room bigger than most houses'. Brady is keen not to just 'turn up, raid and leave'. As he says, his company always uses suppliers from the local area: 'It's an ethos of ours to support everything locally, whether it's here in the Bahamas or in Dubai or Wiltshire.' Spears herself (30) neatly distils what makes the event so remarkable for anyone and everyone attending. 'To drive 10 minutes and see this is crazy,' she says. 'And I know for some people who live in a big city, that's their norm, but for us it's not. And so, even for me as a dancer who's seen this all over the world, to have my feet in the sand, and watch a Christopher Wheeldon work with one of the world's most celebrated ballerinas – it still doesn't feel real.' Iconique has clearly got off to a flying start, and Ballet Under the Stars is now well established. Thinking of the latter's success, though, I can't help asking Brady why, in England, country-house opera is such a phenomenon, but Hatch House its only regular balletic equivalent? Historically speaking, I wonder if the discrepancy lies in ballet's relative newness as an art form compared with opera, and its maybe half-dozen genuinely canonical works compared with opera's almost endless supply. But Brady's mind goes to more immediate, practical concerns. 'Can I be brutally honest?' he says. 'It's because it's really hard. I've spent 15 years developing and honing what we do, developing the contacts not only with the artists but also in staging, flooring, lighting, and keeping the costs within budget, developing sponsorships and agreements with partnerships – and we've barely made money.' As that admission of Brady's suggests, the British country-house scene is highly competitive, and it is also unforgiving – one prominent opera festival has had to change its remit almost completely because of falling demand. But Brady really does seem to be on to something with these ventures. As he tells me, his policy is simple: 'Don't just bring them something – bring them something extraordinary.'
Trade Arabia
29-03-2025
- Trade Arabia
SAii Lagoon Maldives, Curio Collection introduce sober spirits
SAii Lagoon Maldives, Curio Collection by Hilton at CROSSROADS Maldives have introduced Sober Spirits, a range of premium alcohol-free distilled spirits. This initiative caters to those who love the craft of spirits and cocktails but prefer to skip the buzz. The magic behind Sober Spirits lies in its meticulous crafting process, which involves an initial distillation before alcohol is gently removed using state-of-the-art techniques. The result is an authentic, alcohol-free flavor profile. Sober Spirits Gin 0.0% and Rum 0.0% bring the depth, complexity, and aromatic experience of classic spirits to the table. They can be enjoyed neat, paired with mixers, or stirred into inventive mocktails. Lyre's Amaretti Non-Alcoholic adds a nutty and sweet sophistication to the sober sipping experience. Guests at SAii Lagoon Maldives, Curio Collection by Hilton, and dining hotspots in the Marina can now experience this first-of-its-kind offering. They can enjoy zero-proof Mojitos, herbaceous G&Ts, or enjoy Sober Spirits on the rocks for an extraordinary moment. -TradeArabia News Service
