EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
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Counting the costs of communal sacrifice in plague-stricken Eyam
Contagious tragedy: Eyam Pic: Marc Brenner
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
Eyam
Shakespeare's Globe, London
WHEN the plague arrived in 1665 at the Peak District village of Eyam, the villagers took the heroic decision to close their gates and ride out the effects rather than flee and spread the contagion in Derbyshire. Thirteen months later, only 83 of its 356 inhabitants had survived.
Don Taylor’s Roses of Eyam first brought this communal sacrifice to the stage in the 1970s, but Matt Hartley’s new play for the Globe removes the idealised gauze. His villagers are hard products of the mines, poverty and civil war and internecine disputes rage — imagine The Crucible written by Jimmy McGovern.
Sam Crane’s idealistic, rather insipid reverend arrives at his new parish with his strong-willed and supportive wife (Priyanga Burford) to find the previous churchman has been lynched. There is a long-time contender for his role and the villagers are at each other’s throats.
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Family issues and dragon-fuelled history amount to a vacuous spectacle that ill-fits the theatre, muses SIMON PARSONS
GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends an inspiring, political and bittersweet account of the munitions factory workers who are the fore-runners of the modern women’s game
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class