Tag archives for Elizabeth Allen
Wildfell Hall: Still Relevant
ELIZABETH ALLEN Anne Brontё was the youngest, least famous of the sisters. Yet hers is the novel that offers a stunning, overtly feminist, attack on the patriarchal structures of the…
Weight of the Soul
ELIZABETH ALLEN The exhibition Doom Reimagined, at All Saints’ Church, offered various and vivid responses by local artists to the church’s own medieval Doom painting. Many of the reimaginings were…
Top Girls: Coercion, Conflict, Desperation
ELIZABETH ALLEN Top Girls is a play of fast and furious talk. The characters do not merely argue and contradict, they talk over each other, each pushing her own narrative,…
Girls Still on Top
ELIZABETH ALLEN Top Girls is an extraordinary play by an extraordinary playwright. Caryl Churchill has been called Britain’s “most brilliant living playwright” and this play “hilarious, ground-breaking, gritty”. Characteristic of…
Getting Your Flicks Fix
ELIZABETH ALLEN When I moved ‘down from London’ to Hastings twenty years ago, I found much to enjoy and cherish. But, oh, did I miss my weekly fix of cinema:…
Genuinely Natural Beauty Products
ELIZABETH ALLEN A new range of beauty products with a gorgeous smell, produced by local herbalist Mary Valentine and with the attractive name Wildcrafted Skincare: what’s not to like? Although…
The Ellen Terry Theatre Haunts The Stables
ELIZABETH ALLEN Following their recent witty and joyful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Ellen Terry Barn Theatre company returns to the Stables with an altogether darker prospect. This…
Tosca Becomes of Age
ELIZABETH ALLEN With its series Becoming - the first, Becoming Carmen, followed last year by Becoming Tosca - Prologue Opera, describing itself as “part theatre, part opera company”, has set…
The Knowing Charm of the Eternally Ambiguous
ELIZABETH ALLEN “Ambiguity is essential to The Turn of the Screw: that’s why people find it attractive.” So says Tim Blackwell, writer and director of the latest adaptation of Henry…
Saxony Blues
ELIZABETH ALLEN Each performance in Max Baillie’s programme of St Leonard’s Concerts has offered a fascinating extension of musical possibility in terms of unusual instrumentation and juxtapositions of the familiar…
Hastings Poet on the Pilgrim Path
ELIZABETH ALLEN In this time of violence and turmoil, we were granted an hour of peace and beauty in the calm space of Berwick churchwatching. Watching sunset light shimmer across…
Chekhov, Chairs, Complexity
ELIZABETH ALLEN on the multi-faceted Cherry Orchard Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is a slippery play, mood and perhaps genre shifting within the same scene: farce and frivolity jostle with pain…
The Cherry Orchard Comes to The Stables
ELIZABETH ALLEN Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard may be one of theatre’s better known dramas, but there has always been dispute over what kind of play it is and how it…
Cindy Oswin’s Cell
ELIZABETH ALLEN on Cindy Oswin - writer, librettist, actor, academic - and her new one-act play showcasing and interrogating Julian of Norwich “All shall be well, all shall be well…
Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land
Drama on screen at the Kino Teatr Review by Elizabeth Allen The innovation of screening live stage performances, drama and opera, and so making them widely available, has unarguably proved…