BRIEFLY BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

come on, catch up

brief encounter

18/02/08/// For those who asked... this is what I have been seeing since I last got around to typing here... Morrissey at the Roundhouse - Tremendous show, as good as I have seen him since 1999 and the robotik-krautrock chugging on Last Of The Famous International Playboys was a triumphant closer. /// Madam Butterfly at ENO. This was the Minghella production and it had some beautiful set pieces especially the death scene all sprawled out with red silk drapes. Generally though a little too fussy and with some ineffective puppetry that was just annoying. I generally don't much care for opera translated into english but Judith Howarth sang beautifully as CioCioSan./// Brief Encounter at Haymarket Cineworld. Kneehigh Theatre put on some exciting, innovative work and this was perhaps the best thing I have seen them do. A version of the film of the Noel Coward play performed in an old theatre that had been turned into a cinema and now back into a theatre which mixed live action, film and song. It's funny, intelligent and really quite daring to risk something as experimental as this right in the heart of the West End./// Woyzeck performed by a Korean Mime Troupe at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I love Woyzeck usually. But this was pretty hard going./// Finally - I just started Rupert Thomson's novel Death of A Murderer which is about a policeman who is having to spend a night guarding the corpse of Myra Hindley. It's good. So good in fact that I think I will have to stop everything else and read it through to the end.///