Palace, Manchester; Globe; Rose Lipman Building, London
Manchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a celebration, almost a flaunting of international experiment. Inspired by the absurdist gifts of Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman brings together, under the least flamboyant of titles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe and Robert Wilson.
There is no making sense of Kharms. That is his point. The Russian ironist and dandy, who hated old people and pets and was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, wrote elliptical stories, often tragic in content and comic in expression, sometimes only a paragraph long. An author of children's books who disliked children, he was a victim of the Soviet Union's antipathy to the avant garde. Rounded up by the secret police, he died in a prison hospital in 1942. He was 36.
There is, it turns out, a way of making his work vivid,...
Manchester international festival has always been theatrically lively. This year's programme looks the strongest yet. It opens with a celebration, almost a flaunting of international experiment. Inspired by the absurdist gifts of Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman brings together, under the least flamboyant of titles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Willem Dafoe and Robert Wilson.
There is no making sense of Kharms. That is his point. The Russian ironist and dandy, who hated old people and pets and was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, wrote elliptical stories, often tragic in content and comic in expression, sometimes only a paragraph long. An author of children's books who disliked children, he was a victim of the Soviet Union's antipathy to the avant garde. Rounded up by the secret police, he died in a prison hospital in 1942. He was 36.
There is, it turns out, a way of making his work vivid,...
- 7/6/2013
- by Susannah Clapp
- The Guardian - Film News
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