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Tag: Philip Kuhn

How to wait for your number to be called

THE SYMBOLIC POWER of the waiting room pervades an understanding of life itself. It’s a turbulent mix of helplessness in the face of some greater force, conjoined with the complex energy of an end crookedly and precariously in sight. Just out of focus, and around the corner, as […]

For those who died as cattle

IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]

Shimmy down memory lane with Kate

A SHOW WITH a gleaming singer in tight sparkly lamé and a fur boa, her memories of the hardships and joys of a life on stage, and an accompanist on piano, sticking to the world’s best standards is not a novel idea. Toss the inimitable Kate Normington into […]

Ode to a broken forest

IT TAKES IMMENSE skill and maturity to know that the telling of a story filled with detail and drama, with interstices of horror and loss and replete with almost 60-year-old ghosts is done not with gimmicks and tricks, with big noise and flashing lights, but with an old […]

Only Gertrude. Only Alice.

OCCASIONALLY, IN THIS country and this industry, one is privy to a work that absolutely shines with all the values that good theatre promises to deliver. Amid all the political correctness, the paralysing self-censorship and other contemporary humourless ghoulies that beset our already beleaguered arts, there is this: […]

On Aïda and losing the plot

  A TALE OF politics and love, betrayal and death, Verdi’s opera Aïda, composed in 1870, is arguably one of the opera genre’s most known works. Indeed, it’s probably the repository for the most famous ensembles, tunes that you can whistle on your way to the theatre in […]

It is never only lipstick

THE WELSH VILLAGE of Aberfan in October of 1966 weathered a catastrophe worse than anyone could have imagined. At 09:15 in the morning of an otherwise ordinary but wet day, a colliery spoil tip slid down the mountain and drowned a primary school in a 12m-deep avalanche of […]

Biases, secrets of a sweet old curmudgeon

IT’S EASY TO get emotionally entwined in the harsh finger-pointing that sees the elderly of a community abandoned. It makes for predictable storytelling and indictments on the callousness of the younger generation. What is more difficult is representing the other side of a story that is about rejection […]