NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Bloody chamber theatre
SUSAN DARLINGTON revels in an exhilarating adaptation of the gruesome fairytale that invokes the real-life horror of women lost to male violence
Tristan Sturrock and Katy Owen in Emma Rice’s Blue Beard
[Pic: Steve Tanner] 
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
Blue Beard
York Theatre Royal
ANYONE who’s seen a previous Emma Rice production will know what to expect from Blue Beard: bawdy humour, music hall, and emotional heft. These are all characteristics she shares with Angela Carter, whose work she admires so much she named her theatre company after her 1991 novel Wise Children.
The biggest surprise is, perhaps, that it’s taken her so long to adapt Charles Perrault’s gruesome folktale, which Carter notably updated in classic feminist short story The Bloody Chamber. Rice leans into this revisionist angle in a way her hero would doubtless approve in this co-production with Birmingham Rep, HOME Manchester, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, and York Theatre Royal.
It’s a characteristically unruly, exhilarating show that lures the audience into false security with mischievous jokes aimed at everyone from Jamie Oliver to Claire from Steps.
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