Kent - Isola

An indie-edged guitar-rock album, but one with particularly nice sonics. What does that even mean? I like it, anyway, though on first blush it doesn't seem made of the kind of stuff that really sings. Has a lighter touch than Hagnesta Hill, incidentally, even though that other came later.

"The opposite is fiction": The Essex Green - Cannibal Sea

Sprightly, elegant, 60s-infused pop that sets its camp up somewhere between the classic revivalist tent and some strong folk- and power-pop streams, though my favourite is the distinctly Stereolab-y "Cardinal Points", complete with minute-and-a-bit-long guitar wig-out ending ("This Isn't Farm Life" and "Snakes in the Grass" are also particularly rad). It's a good record - not a weak song to be seen, plenty of likeable melodies (it reminds me a bit of the Fiery Furnaces at points, too).

The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present edited by Scott Plagenhoef and Ryan Schreiber

I enjoyed reading this, of course - I long ago made my peace with the 'fork and any list of this kind, along with brief accompanying wraps on each of the inclusions, put together by the site was always going to be at least readable. Moreover, breaking the book up into three or four year periods (each introduced by a brief overview of the time) and making some attempt to arrange the songs within each of those periods into an approximate narrative of the musical milieu of the time works well - while also reinforcing the sense, generated in the first instance by the selections themselves, that the 500 here really do reflect a kind of contemporary 'indie' canon consensus (which at the same time forces the realisation of just how influential pitchfork has been, because really their purview extends considerably beyond even the broadest notion of 'indie' or 'alternative') - and the interspersed mini-lists are a nice touch.

That said, something about the format seemed to result in the write-ups being less inspiring than I might have expected; of the songs that I know (extended pause now while I count them: 182...and I've just realised that I like, and in most cases really, really like nearly every one of those), only a very small handful made me want to really go out and listen to them again, loud, and only one of that small handful remains in my mind right now (the one on "Cross Bones Style", for one particularly piquant turn of phrase); moreover, there wasn't a single one on a song that I didn't already know that made me think that I had to hear it.

There doesn't seem much point going into individual selections, though I must say I was pleased that "Lazy Line Painter Jane" cracked the list - and, as I mentioned before, the canonical nature of the list is striking in patches (though there are probably easily a hundred more which would've taken their places just as easily as 'obvious' choices had they in fact been included).

Songs that the list has got me to listen to in the last few minutes (though not particularly, as noted above, due to the way they're described in the book): "Headache" by Frank Black (I still like "Bad Harmony" more), "Heartbeats" by the Knife, "The City" by the Dismemberment Plan, "Ever Fallen in Love" (Buzzcocks of course).

Drop Dead Gorgeous

Reasonably entertaining satirical comedy following the leadup to a teenage beauty pageant in smalltown Minnesota which could've been so much better than it in fact is, especially given those strutting their stuff - Kirsten Dunst and Denise Richards as the leading contenders, Ellen Barkin and Kirstie Alley as their respective mothers, and the likes of Amy Adams and Brittany Murphy as other contestants...not all great actors by any stretch, but all seemingly well to brilliantly suited to playing the sorts of roles they have here. But it just doesn't coalesce properly, feeling lead-footed and prone to pulling its punches despite the seriously over the top moves it makes.

Kelly Clarkson - All I Ever Wanted

Pretty much what you want a Kelly Clarkson album to be - vividly 'now' pop anthems and ballads with just a couple of rockers thrown in...the songs are good and it might be the most consistent of her four records (elsewhere, see here, here and here), and has high points which come close to matching those of Breakaway. Not breaking any new ground, either for KC or generally, but of course that isn't the point.

Let the Right One In

Completely lives up to the hype - Let the Right One In is nothing short of superb. It feels odd to throw a superlative at the film, though, for in its quiet way, it feels a bit beyond words - to watch it is to be wrapped up in a distinctly filmic experience, in which horror, drama and a sweet, painful coming-of-age romance coexist in complete harmony. It's a genuine horror movie - the vampire elements are far from merely symbolic, aesthetic or mechanical - but it functions equally well on those other levels, and as a pure mood piece, too. A couple of born-of-budget-shortcomings moments of sfx hokiness aside, its craftsmanship is beyond reproach, including the spectral, compelling performances put in by the two child leads, and to the extent that it builds to a climax, it's oddly muted and the more effective for it. A real pearl.

(w/ M)

Pete Fidler, Sal Kimber & Fireside Bellows @ East Brunswick Club, Sunday 22 March

Pete Fidler, a dobro player teamed with a guitarist and a double bass, music very dobro-y. Pleasant but not overly memorable, and I thought the band wasn't as tight as a unit as it might've been. Then Sal Kimber, a skinny bundle of energy who reminded me a bit of Jen Cloher and a bit of Justine, and had some very good songs and a great way of selling them, alternating between banjo and guitar and backed by a full band (guitar, bass, drums, keys). Her thing was a kind of blues-folk-rock-pop thing, and a lot of fun. And finally Fireside Bellows, ordinarily a two piece but joined on stage by a couple of others to flesh out their sound, which is a somewhat but not overly contemporised take on the cosmic/high and lonesome thing, the m & f harmonies and way of writing songs evoking Gram and Emmylou - they were very winning and I liked 'em a lot.

(w/ Wei)

Watchmen

Actually very faithful, and very good - just rock solid across the board, and brings the book to life in suitable style. The moral lines and complexities of Moore's text aren't sacrificed, and the different ethoses represented by Rorschach, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Dr Manhattan, etc come through clearly, while the action scenes are exciting and emphatic; the mood is about right too, if not quite as despairingly heavy and grimy as on the page. And the actors do enough to convince; Patrick Wilson as Dreiburg and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach are particularly good. The soundtrack is interesting, too, leaning heavily on music from the 60s (and 70s?) despite the alternate-80s period setting.

(w/ M)

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Bavarian Fruit Bread

Even more dreamy and hushed than her Mazzy Star stuff. It's a bit on the insubstantial side, but the gauze is a matter of taste and certainly has its place, and besides, I could happily listen to Sandoval sing just about anything.

Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

A set of quirky, ornate, piano-y, somewhat experimental, full band singer-songwriter pop. A bit like Destroyer, a bit like the Decemberists, a bit like the Dears. "No One Does It Like You" continues to be rad.

Spoon - "Love Ways" ep

More Spoon! From a few years back, I think - kinda boppy. Yes...

Ali Smith - The First Person and other stories

I still find Ali Smith more frustrating than enjoyable to read (last time, it was The Accidental), but having worked my way through this collection of short stories, I'm increasingly inclined to think that she's worth the effort. Her writing is demanding - formally experimental and dense - and requires wrestling with, but the rewards can be considerable, even if I still feel I've only scraped the surface.

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

The third impeccable album in a row from Neko Case (fourth if one includes the live Tigers), and her most abstract and impressionistic yet. She's never particularly been one for conventional song structures, particularly since the watershed of Blacklisted, but Middle Cyclone is a step further than anything Case has recorded before, and it's increasingly exciting to see the direction that she's going in - the result is something edging ever closer to 'pure' music, and already it sounds very far from anything else that's happening out there...there are traces of all the ground she's staked out before, the haunted, shadowy country-noir terrain which picked up such intriguing resonances in Fox Confessor in particular, but now writ anew.

It seems besides the point to discuss individual tracks, for this is a record about texture, sound and melody rather than discrete parts...the shorter mood pieces work as well as the fuller songs; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

* * *

Previously (in order of release/happening rather than order of listening by me): The Virginian, Furnace Room Lullaby, Canadian Amp, Blacklisted, The Tigers Have Spoken, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and live.

"IMP October 2008"

Got a bit of a backlog of IMPs to listen to. This one's a moodily atmospheric set, Boards of Canada and Dust Brothers and Four Tet etc (subliminal/abstract electronic type stuff); I had it on last night while doing something else, so wasn't paying fullest attention, but I think the only track with lyrics was the Billie Holliday number pretty much dead in the middle.

(from John in Boulder, CO)

The National - Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers

An older one, but doesn't lose much by comparison to Alligator and Boxer - more velvety, rough-edged modern chamber-rock, replete with subtle hooks and huge crescendos.

David Bowie - Hunky Dory

Strange that I've never listened to this before, but still. For mine, Hunky Dory isn't a patch on Low or even Ziggy, but it's still a rather darling pop singer-songwriter Bowie record, and in "Changes", "Oh! You Pretty Things" and "Life on Mars" it has three of his most recognisable and, probably, greatest songs up its sleeve, so...

More on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Ruth's book club recently did The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in part because she told them that it was the only one that everyone in my book club (the NV one) had liked, and after that meeting said that everyone in that club had been curious about why we liked it so much, and requested an email distillation. It's taken me a while to get round to it, but I eventually expanded my previous thoughts, as follows:

* * *

[...] the short version would go something like this: I like "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" because it's haunted, poetic and human, and because it makes me feel all sad and stirred-up inside...

To begin with, an idea: in literature as in all art, only the particular and specific can be truly universal. To create something which somehow expresses or otherwise touches upon the universal (which is not to say that this is or should be the goal of all literature, natch), it's necessary to focus on a specific setting and milieu rather than dealing in windy abstractions and generalities; the most well-known of Shakespeare's plays, for example - "Romeo and Juliet", say, or "Hamlet" or "Lear" or "The Tempest" - derive their universality and archetypal flavour precisely from the playwright's close, nuanced scrutiny and 'pushing' of the particular characters and events which inhabit and constitute those works.

Whether or not you agree with all of that (I happen to, by the way), I think it's just such a dialectic (not quite the word I'm after but you know what I mean) that's at work in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - McCullers' is an intense scrutiny of a small group of characters in a particular place and time (namely 1930s small-town southern America), and in particular of the loneliness, incipient anomie and sense of yearning for something they're unable to clearly identify that afflicts all of them, but it also comes to serve as microcosm, illustration and exemplar of what might be called, were it not so pretentious, the 'human condition' as perceived and experienced by McCullers herself.

Of course, the trick is in how McCullers achieves this. The inside front page of my secondhand Penguin edition quotes Graham Greene as saying that "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility" and I reckon that phrase - 'an original poetic sensibility' - gets it just right...there's just something about it. The novel has a clarity of vision that's at once troubling and affecting -

The poignancy of its characters' plight (a plight which is referable to the sort of existential malaise which lies over all of them rather than to any particular events or happenings in their lives) is highlighted by the tenuous, unarticulated ways in which they relate to Singer. In many ways, the deaf-mute stands at the centre of the book, but it's the characters over whom he exerts his strange fascination - Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Dr Copeland, and most of all Mick Kelly - who most touch and linger, which may be precisely the point. After all, Singer himself is a strangely absent central figure, not only in the literal sense of his muteness, but also in that his motives are almost completely opaque to the characters, including, perhaps, himself (Biff seems to get closest, but even he doesn't understand the half of it); it's telling that Greene, in that line above, speaks of McCullers in the same breath as William Faulkner, for both are inextricably tied up with the idea of the southern gothic, which itself is characterised by the use of (among other devices) grotesque elements to highlight and throw into relief the setting and milieu being explored. Singer is not who everyone thinks he is; he is a blank canvas on which they can project their longings for human connection and understanding.

It seems clear that, for McCullers, if we can't live alone, then we also haven't yet fathomed how to live with each other. One thing that the novel is about is the gaps between people, and how impossibly difficult those gaps may be to bridge - the loneliness that is experienced by everyone in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is a deeply social loneliness...people are all around us, if we could only connect.

...which leads naturally to the political elements of the novel, such as they are. For mine, these aspects of the book are its weakest - McCullers is better on the personal, human dimensions of her canvas, whether in isolation (Mick's inchoate development, Biff's half-articulated feelings for the girl) or shading into the political (Dr Copeland's difficult relationship with his people and his family, Jake's alcoholism and fiery idealism), than with the overtly political stuff (which is not so surprising given that she was only 23 when the book was published and presumably younger while writing it). Still, they have their place - set pieces like the conversations between Blount and Copeland, playing out the classic lefty strategy of (as I once saw it memorably put in a different context) drawing their wagons into a circle and firing inwards, add to the sense of sorrow that is imbued in every line of the book...and of course she can't be faulted for giving fascism a good kicking, nor for wrapping the progressive political movements of the time (and their failures) up with the wider malaise which then afflicted (and continues to afflict) society at large, and those aspects of the novel left me not merely sad, but actually angry, too, in a way that few others have (Toni Morrison's "Beloved" leaps to mind as one other with such an impact).

But for all of that, for all of the sense of sadness and shadowy, heavy melancholy, of failures of connection and understanding, of loss and absence in it, there's something miraculous about "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - it remains humane and somehow pure of vision...it has a kind of crystalline quality. Whatever it is that makes literature great, this novel has it.

Phew! I could go on, but I'm kind of running out of steam and this is already pretty long, and messy too. [...]

Kim Richey - Rise

Anyone who can sound, vocally, like Sarah McLachlan on one song (say "Without You") and Lucinda Williams on another (say "Cowards in a Brave New World") deserves points for versatility at least; I suspect Richey's natural singing voice is closer to the sweetly scratchy purr that's at its most heightened on melancholy album opener "Girl in a Car". In fact, while Richey does reveal herself to be pretty musically versatile across the 13 country/adult-alternative tracks making up Rise, there's a lot more than that to like here - the songs are strong, and arranged and delivered in a way that's fresh and appealing while also possessing depth.

"Degas: Master of French Art" @ NGA, Canberra

Though this exhibition was one of the main reasons for our excursion to Canberra over the last few days (indeed, it was the original stimulus), Degas isn't particularly a touchstone for me, and nor do I know particularly much about him; still, I was interested and a bit excited to see what he was all about.

The exhibition provides a wide cross-section of his work, including a large proportion of prints (etching, lithography, etc) and sketches, including chalk and pastel type work, as well as a fair number of sculptures and even some photography, but relatively few (though still a significant number) of the oil paintings with which I primarily associate him. The ones of dancers tended to most catch my eye and appeal - the subject/motif seems best suited to his ideas about colour, shade and composition, whether in clearer, relatively formally posed and arranged pieces like 'The dance class' (1873-6), or in more ethereal works like the forest scene of 'Dancers, pink and green' (c 1890) in which the dancers resemble fairies, or those somewhere in between such as 'The ballet of "Robert le diable" ' (1871), in which ghostly dancers blur into each other on stage in the background, while the foreground of audience members watching the stage (including one man looking off to the side with a pair of binoculars) is rendered in more distinct outlines. That said, the racecourse ones have an interesting combination of the earthy and crude on the one hand, and the suggestive and abstract on the other, and have their own appeal.

Having looked at this exhibition, I can understand why parallels are drawn between Degas' work and the main stream of the French impressionists, but my sense was that something different is going on in his work, even beyond his rejection of the 'en plein air' technique and the typical impressionist variegated light-and-colour method, something tending more towards abstraction (in the senses of both non-representationality and speaking to something beyond themselves). I haven't been inspired, but I do feel like his art may have more to say to me than I'd previously imagined.

"You may ask yourself: How did I get here?": Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

I haven't quite made up my mind about this one - an appropriate turn of phrase given its subject matter, namely the nature of consciousness and identity. I expected to get a lot out of it, was put offside by its first few chapters, gradually began to trust it a bit more as it progressed, and ended up feeling something more akin to a distanced admiration than any real liking for it by its end. It's a very clever book, and its themes of course interest me, but it lacks a certain lightness of touch or something, I'm not sure. It's a bit too cerebral (hah), perhaps, and not human enough, something which I suspect is one part a Powers thing and one part down to what The Echo Maker is about.

Astor Piazzolla - Libertango & Piazzolla & Amelita Baltar

Two neat Piazzolla records. The first is a real bandoneon workout (all instrumental), lively, swirling, slyly humorous, dramatic; and Baltar's soupily soulful voice suits the style of song (melancholy, fluidly stop-start, almost spoken word at points, also dramatic) that appears on the second very well.

(More about Baltar here.)

Life Beyond Mars: Bowie Covered

A collection of Bowie covers by contemporary electronic artists - there's a natural sympathy between the genre (widely defined - a lot of ground is covered here, so to speak, under that label) and the (often hallowed) originals that are reworked here. My favourites are, by and large, the more pop-edged melodic ones, Au Revoir Simone's "Oh! You Pretty Things" in particular, though a couple of the downbeat techno-inflected ones are nice too; Leo Minor's "Ashes to Ashes", coming off like a failed attempt to do what the Futureheads did with "Hounds of Love", however, only served to remind me how great the original it is.

"Moonlight & Magnolias" (MTC)

Takes place entirely in a single room, that being the office of producer David O Selznick in 1939, needing a rewrite of the screenplay of Gone With the Wind from scratch as a matter of urgency; Selznick, so the story goes, locked new screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Victor Fleming (fresh recruited from The Wizard of Oz) into a room for five days, feeding them only bananas and peanuts - and, as the screenwriter hadn't read the book, acted out its scenes with Fleming to show Hecht how they should play. The scenes in which those enactments take place (done by two men in suits, natch) are the funniest - like tears rolling down cheeks funny - in a play which is frequently very funny indeed, though less screwball than I'd expected. Peppy and bright, this was a good one.

[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]

"Till there are no strangers any more" (2008 cd)

I've been slow about distributing this one (still nowhere near done) but here's the tracklist to the soundtrack of my '08 plus most of the accompanying comments:

1. Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us – Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
from Raising Sand (Rounder; 2007) – “Sister Rosetta” is just one gem amongst many on this record, but there’s something about it that lingers...and Krauss’ voice is still to die for, of course.

2. Late Nite – Slumber Party
from Musik (Kill Rock Stars; 2006) – in another universe, this song went top 40 and we all dream and watch black and white movies and hold hands and go for walks at night a lot more than we do in this one.

3. No Bad News – Patty Griffin
from Children Running Through (ATO; 2007) – delightfully upbeat and damn near irresistible, this, and she sure can sing.

4. Pumpkin Soup – Kate Nash
from Made of Bricks (Fiction; 2007) – what can I say? This song is hella cool, is all. [also, here]

5. 23 – Blonde Redhead
from 23 (4AD; 2007) – probably the song that I listened to most in 2008. Mysterious, urgent, and dizzying, it gives me a rush. [also, here and here]

6. Ode to LRC – Band of Horses
from Cease to Begin (Sub Pop; 2007) – a perfect song for being blinded by the sun to. [also, here]

7. Godspell – The Cardigans
from Super Extra Gravity (Universal; 2005) – another anthem! I think it’s about religion.

8. Fake Empire – The National
from Boxer (Beggars Banquet; 2007) – this one’s about America. It’s moody. And awesome.

9. Modern Love – The Last Town Chorus
from Wire Waltz (Hack Tone; 2006) – because sometimes, mournful Bowie covers is where it’s totally at. [also, here]

10. Crush in the Ghetto – Jolie Holland
from Springtime Can Kill You (Anti; 2006) – one for the warmer months, as the days grow longer...shadows and sunshine and all that. I must confess, I’m a little bit in love with Holland. [also, here, albeit from '09]

Hell of a year, really, and music has been even more tightly woven into its fabric than usual; these ten songs, and the albums from which they came, could well have been the soundtrack to it...they’re the ones which carry the strongest associations from the twelve months just gone – associations which are largely impressionistic rather than particularly clear and distinct, but none the less vivid for that.

Rachel Getting Married

I've seen this sort of film before - this sort of ensemble drama taking place at some significant social gathering, often, as here, a wedding - but rarely done as well as here. Rachel Getting Married, it's called, but it's really about Rachel's unstable, unthinkingly self-absorbed, just-out-of-rehab sister Kim, rendered by Anne Hathaway (who I don't think I've seen in anything before, though of course I know 'who she is' in the media sense) in a striking performance which seems to synthesise an intense naturalism with a marked level of craft, and the film's focus remains principally on her, though it's large enough (in canvas and spirit) to also take in the web of relations connecting the various members of her immediate family, and others associated with the wedding, with each other.

Watching it was a bit of a gruelling experience for reasons both internal and external to the film - as to the former, Kim's speech at the celebratory dinner, for example, is up there amongst the most excruciatingly embarrassing, cringeworthy scenes I can recall in a movie (and perfectly set up by what has come before), while as to the latter, I started the film with a headache which only worsened with the hand-held camera-captured progress of events - but Rachel is an impressive bit of film-making.

The Darjeeling Limited

This one left an impression on me when I first saw it, and has grown better and better in my mind since then, so it was somewhat to my surprise and regret that, on revisiting Darjeeling, it seemed thinner and less satisfying than the idea of it that I've been carrying around - more disconnected, less rich with hints of the profound...which is not to say that I'd disavow my previous responses to the film, but rather that those responses have now acquired another layer, another filter of sorts, I guess. I still think that it's v.g., but it seems (and is) no longer as resonant as before.

Serenity

Punchy, swiftly plotted and brightly engaging, Serenity is still, on second viewing, a neat riff on the space opera thing, if, unsurprisingly, not as much of a thrill as the first time around.

Ran

Kurosawa's retelling of King Lear (with some significant changes, particularly the flipping of the children's genders, the emphasis on the aging ruler's past acts of violent conquest, and the harder-edged reading given to the Cordelia figure's character, Saburo) makes for an intense and rewarding experience. It struck me as grittier and more grimly existential than Shakespeare's play, using 'existential' in a sense informed by that specific 20th century stream of continental thought, though it lacks that other's almost Romantic sense of existential (in a wider and possibly deeper sense) anguish and outrage and something of its sense of grandeur and scope; still, it's much more faithful than not to its source, and in a way which is obviously carefully thought through and strikingly consistent and effective in its divergences, and in how it deals with the themes of the play in its own fashion (the way that it grounds Hidetora's - ie, Lear's - tragedy in his past actions, giving it an air of inevitability, is particularly striking, as is the way it deals with the notion of loyalty). It creates its own world and fully inhabits it for the whole of its two and a half (nearly three) hour running time - it's monumental.

Mystery Men

I think Michelle got it right when she said that Mystery Men was disappointing even though she hadn't had any particular expectations of it. Both the premise (ragtag group of superhero wannabes with wimpy at best superpowers are forced to step up with the city's leading superhero goes missing) and the cast (Janeane Garofalo, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Waits, William H Macy and others) raise expectations that it could be a genuinely sharp, edgy, funny satire, but instead it's simply a good-natured and somewhat overlong action-comedy, pleasant enought but ultimately forgettable - a pity.

Dixie Chicks - Wide Open Spaces & Top of the World Tour - Live

I've been listening to these guys a lot in the last few months, and this live record brings things together nicely. The band's approach of doing their songs fairly faithfully in concert results in a collection of tracks which differ only slightly from their recorded version; to the extent that they do differ, it's generally in having a greater sense of immediacy, which is all to the good. They're like slightly fuller, more well-lit versions of songs which were always plenty full and well-lit, but none the less welcome for it.

I also picked up Wide Open Spaces not too long ago and like it plenty. Literally every one of their albums is a really good listen from start to finish, packed with sturdy songs and a mix of styles and tempos within the particular pop-tinged country groove they work. I haven't generally taken their music particularly to heart, but I do like listening to it a lot.

"Woyzeck" @ Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse

For all of its crackling, at times high camp energy and furious spectacle, there's something very visceral about this staging of of this staging of Georg Buchner's play, written in the first half of the 19th century and apparently never completed - by play's end, it feels like a solid punch in the stomach after 90-odd minutes of being alternately blinded by bright lights and dragged along by one's hair as a series of almost recognisable images flies by one. In fact, it's neither as abstract and weird, nor quite as intense, as that description makes it sound, but that's the flavour of it nonetheless.

Set to the strains of moody string-led music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, with frequent musical numbers by the members of the cast (including Tim Rogers in a genuinely menacing turn as a Puckish figure who functions as part chorus commenting on the events of the play, part spectre haunting the protagonists and on one occasion taking an active hand, and part embodied avatar of some of the play's themes), its depiction of the titular figure's war and being-the-subject-of-insane-science-experiment-fuelled descent makes for uneasily gripping watching. It aims for the gut - and the imagination - more than for the mind, but that's not a criticism, and here it works; the physicality of the performers serves the production well (the doctor, the drum major, the girl (Bojana Novakovic)), complemented the striking set and set-pieces. Quality.

(w/ Michelle, Trang, Steph, Ruth (+ friend Bronwyn), Bec P and Emrys (+ Kemi); Kim also there, and likewise, coincidentally, Krystyna)