Latest news with #TSEliot
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Wicklow abuse survivor gets closure after clerics acknowledge what happened to him
Jim O'Neill invited members of the Jesuit order to attend his art exhibition A man from Greystones, who was a victim of abuse as a child, has finally been able to feel some sense of closure having completed his Higher National Diploma in Art & Design, at Bray's Institute of Further Education (BIFE). While his abuser is no longer alive, the bold step was taken to invite representatives from the order to the exhibition, where his major piece, 'We Are Forced to Bear Witness', was on display for them to see. The title is taken from a line in TS Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral', with its themes of faith, power and sacrifice, which his abuser guided him through for his Leaving Cert.
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson: Spy, Secretary, Superstar: The Prime of Miss Muriel Spark
Electric Spark: The Enigma Of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury £25, 432pp) In the summer of 1953, Muriel Spark – not yet the famous novelist behind The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – was en route from London to the Edinburgh Festival, rattling with amphetamines. She was reviewing a new play by T.S. Eliot, who praised the ensuing article as 'one of the two or three most intelligent reviews' he read. But a year later, Spark was gripped by drug-induced psychosis, believing that Eliot was sending her cryptic messages, disguising himself as her window cleaner and stealing her food. Prescribed Largactil, she quickly recovered, yet an interest in code-cracking and deceit would always colour her imagination. In the dreary world of post-war British fiction, still a boys' club fixated on realism, be it Kingsley Amis's campus satire Lucky Jim or the kitchen-sink drama of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Spark's sleek brand of experimental struck like lightning. Her 1957 debut The Comforters portrays a woman who hears in her head the text of the very book we're reading. Her 1961 smash hit The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie tells us right away that the maverick teacher of the title (played on screen by Maggie Smith) will be betrayed by her pupils. The first line of 1970's The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favourite of her 22 novels, introduces us to a woman in search of her future murderer – two decades before Martin Amis cemented enfant terrible status with the same idea in London Fields. Enigmatic yet crisp and concise, crackling with twists, each of Spark's 22 novels was written in one go without her needing to revise them – or so she told a BBC interviewer later in life. Frances Wilson casts an admiring yet sceptical eye over that and other claims in this new biography, exploring the mind behind the books. Born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish factory worker and Presbyterian mother in 1918, the author worked as a secretary before leaving Edinburgh for Southern Rhodesia. She had married Sydney Spark, a troubled teacher she met at a dance at 19. He had found a post there after his worrying antics, such as firing a starting pistol in the classroom, had deterred employers at home. Seven years later, Spark walked out on Africa and her husband – as well as their young son, Robin. At a job centre in London she was recruited for undercover work with the Foreign Office, where she helped flood Nazi Germany with propaganda from a clandestine HQ in Bedfordshire. Wilson speculates that it wasn't Spark's first rodeo – she might have been a spy in Bulawayo, identifying enemy aliens among settlers. An abiding interest in secret communication tipped her into madness once she embarked on literary life in London, where she encountered strife from the start. Appointed editor of the magazine Poetry Review in the 1940s, she championed edgier poets such as Eliot and W.H. Auden. 'I started publishing modern poems rather than Christmas card-type poems,' she said in an interview in 2000. But she rubbed long-time contributors the wrong way. 'They would do anything to get published. Those that weren't queer wanted to sleep with me. They thought they were poets and there should be free love or something.' When Spark entered a story competition in The Observer – 'as one might enter for a crossword puzzle,' she said – she won first prize. It poured oil on the jealousy of her on-off lover Derek Stanford, a jobbing writer and sometime collaborator who betrayed her by selling her letters and writing rumour-filled books about her. Spark was 'a magnet for mediocrities', says Wilson, describing alarming encounters in her rackety Grub Street life. Where an earlier biographer referred to Spark's failed seduction by the forgotten experimental novelist Rayner Heppenstall – a BBC producer who was pals with George Orwell – Wilson instead calls it 'attempted rape'. By the Sixties, Spark was a superstar, London in the rear-view mirror. In Manhattan she was given an office with a view of Times Square by the editor of The New Yorker. In 1966 she upped sticks again, to Italy. In Rome she lived in a Renaissance-era apartment so grand she couldn't see the ceiling; in Tuscany, she settled down with Penelope Jardine, an art student she met while getting her hair done. With Jardine as her gatekeeper and companion, peace broke out – at least until Spark received a proposal from biographer Martin Stannard. Spark had praised his biography of Evelyn Waugh in a review for this paper in 1992. When Stannard sent her a card to say thanks, she replied that she wished she herself would have a biographer as good. Stannard seized the moment and put himself forward, though not without trepidation: how would an academic with the dress sense of Norman Wisdom (as he put it) measure up to a woman so chic? The ensuing years were an ordeal for both parties. Spark had sought redress for the tittle-tattle peddled in the books that her former lover Derek Stanford had written about her. But that wish led her to thwart the very biographer she appointed, controlling his work through lengthening bouts of failing health. One of Spark's friends recalls sitting with her at her kitchen table as she read aloud scornfully from Stannard's 1,200-page manuscript, which had been submitted for her approval as per their agreement. Every detail was questioned: her mental breakdown was, she said, actually 'a physical breakdown which inspired a form of dyslexia'. The book, rewritten four times, was eventually published after Spark died in 2006 – essentially in its original form, Stannard tells Wilson. Wilson's own biography avoids a cradle-to-grave approach, opting for a dynamic and dizzying weave of early struggles and future success. She reports that in 1961 a magazine polled leading novelists about whether they wanted to make a political, moral, spiritual or intellectual impact ('Certainly not,' said 007 author Ian Fleming). Spark replied: 'In all four fields I would like more readers to see things as I do.' Wilson calls her the 'most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape'. Hard not to agree.
ABC News
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Cats The Musical Giveaway
Celebrate the 40th Australian Anniversary of Andrew Lloyd Webber's legendary musical Cats, returning to Theatre Royal Sydney this June. Cats is a spellbinding musical that brings T.S. Eliot's whimsical feline characters to life through dazzling dance, iconic music, and unforgettable costumes. Tune in to ABC Radio Canberra for your chance to see the show in Sydney with overnight accommodation for two. Giveaway details Tune in to Breakfast and Drive on ABC Radio Canberra from Monday 2 June 2025 to find out how you can win. Prize details Double pass to see Cats the Musical at the Theatre Royal in Sydney on Saturday 28 June One night accommodation at the Fullerton Hotel Visit the Cat's the Musical's website to find out more. Competition terms and conditions apply.
The Herald Scotland
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: I went to new V&A gardens show and was intrigued by what I saw
April is the cruellest month, at least as far as poet TS Eliot was concerned, but the one which follows in the calendar is just dandy for gardens and gardeners – which makes it the perfect time for an exhibition honouring both. But Garden Futures, opening at V&A Dundee this weekend, is far more than just a horticultural show in gallery form. The idea of the garden as idyll or sanctuary has deep roots in myriad human belief systems so that's explored. So too the proliferation of plant species through the forces of colonialism. We also learn about gardening as a political act in urban settings or as a balm for mental, spiritual and physical health. About how plants and gardens interface with arts, crafts and in particular science and design. And how cultivation and cultivation programmes can intersect with war and geo-politics in ways both good and bad. On that front there is a sizeable, timely and moving section on Israel-Palestine, and the deliberate and methodical displacement of Palestinians. Elsewhere there's a survey of new and radical philosophical approaches to the natural world, such as affording rights to plants and natural elements such as rivers. About low- and high-tech advances in plant propagation, some involving the University of California's wonderfully named Morphing Matter Lab. About how fashion and design continue to find new inspiration from the plant world, for instance through trainers whose soles catch and move seeds. A 17th century Persian ceramic at Garden Futures (Image: Grant Anderson) Helping launch the exhibition on the day I visit there's even a drag queen with a botanical bent – Daisy Desire, horticulturalist by day, drag queen by night. In other words there's far more to unpack here than you could fit in a wheelbarrow. So while the exhibition itself deserves a couple of hours, absorbing and processing it all will be the work of days or even weeks. Gardeners, of course, spend a lifetime thinking about plants and, by extension, the natural world. But they necessarily get their hands dirty too, so appropriately the exhibition opens with a room filled with tools. There are spades, forks, rakes, trowels, scythes, shears, saws and other items whose use I can only guess at. But that lack of knowledge detaches form from function and gives the objects a pleasingly sculptural quality. Other items here include a cat-shaped bird scarer from 1900 and – every home should have one – a glass cucumber straightener from the same period. Form and function meet in different ways elsewhere in this opening room with the inclusion of a range of garden furniture. You'll have seen similar items in your local garden centre though these are the original designs on which they are based. There's a Lloyd Loom wicker chair from 1931. A lounger made in 1938 from slats of lacquered birch by brilliant Finnish designer Aino Aalto, wife of architect Alvar Aalto. Another in chrome and vivid yellow plastic from a decade later, dubbed the Spaghetti Chair lounger and designed by Huldreich Altorfer. Moving into a room showing artworks inspired by gardens and plants there's some neat juxtaposition. Opposite a huge 17th century wall panel composed of yellow and blue ceramic tiles and originally sited in Ishfahan in modern-day Iran you'll find Requiem, a tall sculpture in walnut by Barbara Hepworth. An abstracted arboreal form, it once stood outdoors in the garden of her studio in St Ives. Read more In Room Six, politics intrudes with a display of 70 or so images from Garden State, photographer Corinne Silva's three year project to photograph private and public gardens in 22 Israeli settlements, some in the occupied West Bank. The images literally colonise the walls, presented in small clusters here and there around the room. There's also a selection of books, and among them you'll find Occupation Of The Territories. It's made up of first person testimony from Israel soldiers who served in Gaza and the West Bank between the start of the second Intifada and 2010. One chapter is titled: 'They would close the stores as collective punishment.' You can't miss the relevance. Here we also meet New York-based community activist Liz Christy, who as much as anyone birthed the guerilla gardening movement with a series of interventions in the 1970s which greened urban spaces in the Big Apple. Sadly there's less focus given to another female gardener of note, Victorian horticulturalist and all-round dudette Gertrude Jekyll – she's relegated to a panel in a corridor – but you can't have everything. And at least there are sections on two more recent figures who have folded a love of gardening into their radical creative practices: Antiguan-American author, essayist and activist Jamaica Kincaid, and film-maker and artist Derek Jarman. That accounts for gardens past and present. The gardens of the future which the show's title nods to take up the second half of the exhibition. When philosophy is discussed here it's untethered from religion and ancient belief systems and hitched instead to ideas borrowed largely from environmentalism and activism. The art is less about representation and more about association or out-of-the box thinking. Fashion is co-opted to the task of helping nature. And the digits involved tend to be zeroes and ones rather than fingers operating secateurs or seed dibbers. Céline Baumann's work Parliament of Plants (Image: Céline Baumann) For concrete examples check out The Parliament Of Plants, an unsettling work by artist and landscape architect Céline Baumann underpinned by the idea of giving plants democratic rights. Or Sanne Vaassen's Garden Journal Through Colour, a huge, wall-mounted work in paper which splits the year not into days and weeks but into the different colours present in the artist's garden. Or product designer Kiki Grammatopoulos's rewilding trainers, which use something called bio-mimicry to help wearers spread plants and seeds. Or how about Garden, a video game designed by Dundee-based company Biome Collective? It's set in a universe of singing plants threatened by a darkness spreading rot and decay. Dundee features elsewhere in the exhibition. There's also a section on the Maggie's centre, Frank Gehry's award-winning building at Ninewells Hospital for the support of people with cancer. And we see an artist's impressions of what the Eden Project proposed for the former gas works on East Dock Street might look like. Fingers crossed for that one. Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect who designed V&A Dundee, was inspired in his design by the jagged cliffs of Scotland's east coast. I fondly imagine him knocking it together on a Scotrail service chuntering through Inverkeithing, Burntisland and Markinch. Who knows. Either way, for the rest of this year's it's not geology or topography which will occupy his building's interior but botany and horticulture – not stones and rocks but vibrant life. It's about as big a subject as you can find, but it's clearly and cleverly presented here. That's not to say you won't leave Garden Futures with your head spinning, though. Garden Futures: Designing With Nature opens at V&A Dundee on May 17 and runs until January 25, 2026
Time Out
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
CATS pounces on Cape Town this December!
While there is still a long, wet winter to get through, here's some purr-fectly good news to get you looking forward to summer already... Cape Town's festive season just got a lot more fabulous, with the news that the iconic musical CATS is returning to the Mother City! CATS will run at the Artscape Opera House from 10 December 2025 to 11 January 2026. Presented by Pieter Toerien and GWB Entertainment in association with Cape Town Opera, the production of CATS will also head to Johannesburg's Teatro at Montecasino from 17 January to 22 February 2026. Tickets are available exclusively through Webtickets. Adapted from TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's acclaimed musical brings to life a tribe of feline characters gathering for the mysterious Jellicle Ball. With eye-catching choreography, elaborate costumes and featuring the signature rendition of 'Memory', this new rendition of a much-loved theater classic promises an unforgettable night at the theatre.
