I can’t recommend this enough.
Five plays in one go sounds like too much to cram in. But treated as extended ‘sketches’ the concept works and the 160 minutes, including an interval, passed quickly. And the full evil of Russia is made plain.
In between them, bandura player Mariia Petrovska provided context before cooing beautiful Ukrainian melodies. The Arcola theatre has unearthed an angel!
Eleven years on, and they’re still wonderful.
Why someone – maybe the National Eisteddfod – can’t get them to the UK to perform is a mystery.
In the meantime, you have to come here or go to France where their brand of cabaret has a market.
First gig in Madrid and they went down a storm. Of course.
The capital city’s smart set turned out in numbers for this fund-raising tour by Ukraine’s most popular musical export.
It was something of a surprise that people got there at all.
A few more pictures and a video shot aboard the freaky deaky horsemeat carousel. My nag was called Larry.
The more you think about Banksy’s show, the weirder it gets. Who’d have thought dystopian cynicism would be so enchanting?
It’s like Stalin’s NKVD have been reborn.
‘Don’t smile!’ snapped the young woman at the airport-style entry to paradise complete with cardboard full-body scanner. Of course, you smile, especially having waited hours to get in. I was delirously chuffed. Again, she growled: ‘Don’t smile!’
The tone was set.
Continue reading Banksy’s Dismaland: all the glum of the fair
Second time around, and it’s still the best show in the world.
Dakh Daughters Band headed to Lviv in Western Ukraine to play two concerts in what is regarded by many as the spiritual capital of the country.
Here Ukrainian is more widely spoken than Russian than in the east, which is regarded as more Russian.
The road trip
Up the A4058 from for the latest National Theatre Wales production. Tickets £8. Bargain. Drive through Ponty along a route through never-ending valley villages, all look the same – where’s the join, why do they have different names? A relentless ribbon of squat miner’s homes, grey pebble-dashed terraces.
Another National Theatre Wales stormer – blending music with theatre, mixing a rock star with luvvies on a night full of delights.
If this collection of curveball Kyiv kooks and crazies isn’t the best girl band on the planet then my name’s Yuliya Tymoschenko and I demand to be let out of clink.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen such an awe-inspiring show. It was billed as фрiк кабаре – freak-cabaret – and that would seem about right.
In a dark, dank, dilapidated den of a venue seven soulful sisters systematically smashed out a brilliant mix of melancholy gloom and soaring hypnotic vocals and acted out the songs they sang.
No self-respecting blog anywhere should be without a swashbuckling, swaggering swordfight somewhere on its pages.
So here’s one I filmed last June in Kyiv on the day of the England v Italy game. It was part of the folk football festival held in Podil.
It was a bloody cracker!
The fevered delusions of a man in love make for compelling theatre in this one-man show.
Well before Ozzy Osbourne used it as an album title, Russian writer Gogol wrote a short story on a clerk’s descent into abject humiliation.
And it’s quite a plunge we witness. So though it sounds dark and forbidding it’s performed so expertly that you’re never overwhelmed by the character’s despair.
It’s superbly acted by Robert Bowman who manages to draw us in to the life of a self-important St Petersburg bureaucrat whose chief role seems to be the sharpening of pencils for a bigwig.
He falls for the bigwig’s daughter many years younger than him. A man in love is barely rational and one second he’s howling like a dog on heat, then softly speaking of the raptures of love he feels.
It’s a physically and emotionally demanding role for one actor to sustain, but Bowman manages to switch the contrasting tones of his emotions extraordinarily well.
He gabbles madly in the height of his obsession, slows down and then loses control as the madness deepens. It’s a highly skilled, remarkable, 70-minute performance by Bowman who barely stops talking, ranting and fantasising while careering across the set all the way through.
Afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling that Ozzy must have read the book.
Well worth seeing when it goes on a national tour next year.
Swordfighting and football don’t mix – right? Well I’m not sure after witnessing the Folk Football festival in Kyiv which coincided with the staging of the quarter-finals.
Good on the Ukrainians for using the tournament to promote their own culture.
And I was certainly not prepared for a battle Royal between two acrobatic swordsmen, duelling spectacularly. In fact it was a lot more thrilling than the Italy v England game.
Sparks were flying off the metal blades as they hammered away at each other in a brilliantly choreographed duel. Errol Flynn eat your heart out. The sparks would have been enough for a council health and safety penpusher to step in and declare the event off back in the UK.
Organiser Georgian playwright Raguli Vlasidze, who looked like he was a rumbustious chunky central midfielder with a kick like a horse back in his youth when no doubt he played in Tiflis, organised it to raise money for good causes.
Money raised will promote education, culture and sport, develop Ukrainian cinema and theatre and ‘encourage national spirituality’.
Ceremonial maces were on sale, football games in a giant paddling pool were organised (‘Allowed: hand gestures and lots of smiling’, said the programme).
The big ball on display in the picture is adorned with the designs of the Pysanko – the traditional painted egg of Ukraine.
Interviewing him via an interpreter was difficult as the English version of what he was saying came out in less than perfect sentences. But there was no doubt of an obvious passion for football.
He said: “Football changes our lives so we want to change people, this festival is for this.”
In the programme, it says: “We believe that the time will soon come when football stadiums worldwide will be adorned with national ornamentation, subconsciously elevating the inherent sense of national spirituality.”
In Wales’s case, that could well be a pint glass I reckon.
Previous to its visit to Kyiv’s famous Andryivsky Street, where the famous writer Bulgakov lived, and which is the centrepiece of the city’s historic Podil area, the folk football bandwagon had been to Lviv and to Ivan0-Frankivsk.
So with its giant football pie, I couldn’t get why this particular item featured, it was a suitably surreal and typically Ukrainian weird concoctioN.
And apparently the Football Peace carpet will be blessed by the Pope himself when it reaches Rome.
The festival’s website is at www.bigball.eu
Miles from Nowhere 