The Wild Bride – theatre review

Photo copyright Steve Tanner

Oh, joy of joys – the almighty Kneehigh Theatre Group are back in Bristol, this time with their touring show The Wild Bride. I first enjoyed them at the Bristol Old Vic last year in The Red Shoes (wistful sigh), so when I got wind of the fact they were riding back into town I made sure I booked tickets quick smart.

The Wild Bride (adapted and directed by Emma Rice) was performed at the majestic St George’s while the main theatre at the Old Vic is closed for refurbishment, and the smaller scale of this former church only adds to the intensity of the performance. 

The plot is straightforward enough: a simple farmer mistakenly sells his daughter to the devil, and then tries his best to wriggle out of the deal. Though the devil is a hard task master. However, if you read The Wild Bride as a feminist morality tale, you could argue that the daughter/bride is emblematic of women generally who have been dealt a hard deal at the hands of foolish men. 


The innocent daughter is sold by her dad to the devil, who then rejects her for being too pure. So he insists on painting her in muck, cutting her hands off, and then casts her out into the wild, where she is left to fend for herself... before a prince rescues her, briefly, and she ends up as a homeless single mother, again at the hands of cruel men. The tale of woman's woe doesn't end there, but I won't say more for risk of spoiling the plot. 


In typical Kneehigh style, the play is a combination of bluegrass music, inventive sets, multipurpose costumes, and wonderful singing and dancing from deeply talented people. Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Eva Magyar are all magnificent in varied ways as the Bride at different life stages, and Stuart McLoughlin is truly chilling as the devil (aided by the fact his devil seems to look like Jeremy Kyle!).

I hope it's not too long before Kneehigh are back in town with their next production.

This was the last night of the short run, so I hope you had a chance to catch it in Bristol while you could. If not, don’t fret as it’s on tour – full details on the link here.

Tyrannosaur – film review

 Having long been a fan of Paddy Considine’s acting and screenwriting collaborations with Shane Meadows, I was very excited to see his directorial debut Tyrannosaur. Not for the faint hearted, it’s got an 18 certificate for a reason…

Giving nothing away, the opening scenes see the protagonist Joseph (Peter Mullan) drunkenly and angrily kick his beloved dog to death after losing at the bookies. As if that’s not hard enough to stomach, Joseph’s ensuing remorse at killing his only friend leaves you confused about whether to loathe this character or feel a hint of sympathy for him.

To say Joseph is a troubled soul is to put it mildly. He’s a man whose wife died five years before, after he treated her miserably. He lives in a surprisingly well-kept house in a miserable area, and spends his time watching the young son of his neighbour being neglected by his mother and her rottweiler-wielding boyfriend.

Things start to change when Joseph stumbles into a charity shop run by middle-class, Christian do-gooder Hannah (Olivia Colman). She tries to help Joseph, little realising that her sinister husband James (the wonderful Eddie Marsan) is maliciously observing and stacking the implausible ‘evidence’ up as reasons to inflict further degrading torture and abuse on her in their comfortable home.

Considine’s script and direction hold nothing back. This is as bleak and as harsh as a film can be, and turns in not only amazing efforts from Considine, but an astonishingly brilliant performance from Colman. Having seen her as Sophie in the sitcom Peep Show (and briefly as Considine’s weary ex-girlfriend in the film Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee), in Tyrannosaur she proves that neither of those roles prepares you for the onslaught of her pared back performance as battered Hannah, whose face grows more bruised with every scene.

I could barely speak when the end credits rolled. Tyrannosaur will have you running the gauntlet of emotions from anger to sympathy, nausea and disgust, feel-good to feel-repulsed. The Watershed write-up calls the film “brutal” and “corrosive”, but that’s just the start of it…

This is an extremely impressive and arresting account of domestic abuse on film. But it’s not for the faint hearted.

William – An Englishman, by Cicely Hamilton

I harp on about Persephone Books a lot, but deservedly so. Since 1999, this independent publishing house has been reprinting long-forgotten or neglected books (which deserve to be classics), mostly by women writers, and doing so with beautiful grey covers, elegant endpapers, matching bookmarks and a sympathetic introduction to each volume. While I’ve read maybe 40 Persephone titles (from their 96 books to date), I’d never read their first one… so I’ve now corrected this.

First published in 1918, suffragette Cicely Hamilton’s book William – An Englishman is a confrontational tome in the most complex of ways. Lulling you into a false sense of security as a charming account of everyman William’s humdrum life and gentle new marriage, the characters suddenly realise World War 1 has erupted around them while they are on honeymoon, and chaos and brutal violence dominates.

While conceivably a book about the horror of war, William is much more than that. As a Socialist, William is also a staunch supporter of the suffrage movement and marries a militant suffragette, Griselda. Read in 2011, and having visited the London Stock Exchange occupation at St Paul’s last Sunday (and seen the Bristol occupation progress all this week), it is interesting to compare the socialist actions of William and his comrades in 1914-1918 with the current grassroots uprisings springing up all over the UK (and further afield). The stark tones of futility with which Hamilton describes the movement in the 1910s is perhaps depressing to read alongside the current actions and how they may fare, but it’s also interesting to draw comparisons with almost a 100-year gap of retrospection.

William is a difficult book. I read much of it while traveling on long train journeys and at one point was gulping sobs at a twist in the story, while trying to pretend in a typically British fashion that all was well (but in an equally British fashion, my fellow passengers ignored me). But it’s an excellent book and an important one. With its views on socialism, suffrage and war, William is a book of its time that also resonates across history.

Marjorie Darke - "A Question of Courage"

Suffragette season continues on my blog, and I’m especially pleased to be reviewing Marjorie Darke’s book, not least because it took a lot of tracking down. And if you’re looking for a novel to help educate your early teenagers about the suffragette movement, look no further.

About 20 years ago, we were given Marjorie’s book A Question of Courage to read in English lessons at school. Even then, not knowing anything about the suffragettes beyond what I’d seen in Mary Poppins, the book struck a chord with me – unusually so, for a school set text. That Marjorie later came and gave a talk to our class was even better.

Emily is a 17-year-old seamstress in Birmingham when A Question of Courage starts, struggling to make ends meet. But when Emily is accidentally knocked off her bicycle by a car driven by privileged Louise and Peter, she quickly ends up becoming involved with the growing suffragette movement. Louise’s enthusiasm spurs Emily to join her in militant stunts, leading to a few brushes with the law and contention form her family. But it’s after Emily moves to London that her suffragette career really takes off, and she becomes involved with even bigger stunts… leading to prison and the inevitable force feeding.

The style of writing is sharp enough for a young teenager to understand the seriousness of what Marjorie is sharing, and there’s enough back-story to reinforce Emily as an empathetic person. The lack of detail about some situations is a little frustrating, but also inevitable considering the age of the reader A Question of Courage is aimed at. For instance, it struck me as strange how quickly Emily was converted to the idea of suffrage when previously she’d been listening to her mothers call suffragettes “hussies”. But I think that kind of thing is down to the age of the target reader.

It’s wonderful to know that such a well-written and considerate book about the suffragettes exists for young people, and all credit to Barn Owl books for keeping it in print. It is important that future generations never forget the amazing sacrifices made on their behalf by this wonderful band of inspiring women.