MARIA DUARTE, JOHN GREEN and ANGUS REID review Power Ballad, Landmarks, My Mother’s Wedding, and Fairyland
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Alternative Christmas fare
SIMON PARSONS welcomes an original and alternative production that explores the deepening friendship of three wild swimming women
Debra Baker, Sophie Steer and Emma Lau in Glacier
[Alex Harvey-Brown]
GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by Kenneth Branagh’s lightweight Prospero in an ambitious rendition of the play
Chris Searle speaks to bassist PAUL ROGERS
MARJ MAYO recommends a well illustrated and very positive account of an extraordinary period in local government history
RITA DI SANTO takes us through the prize winners, and takes the temperature of a festival that prioritised narratives of exile, state violence and class division
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
Glacier
Old Fire Station, Oxford
TRUE to Oxford’s Old Fire Station tradition, Glacier is an original, alternative Christmas drama following the fortunes and friendships of three women over 15 years.
All three have been drawn to a deserted lake to escape the pressures and expectations of Christmas Day and for a spot of wild swimming. The unlikely friendship gradually bonds the group around annual Christmas swims, intercut by national and international snippets of news identifying the year and contrasting with their domestic dramas.
With the passing of the years the women reveal ever more about themselves as the trust in their fellow swimmers develops. The wild swimming not only provides opportunities for imaginative and comic physical theatre but also acts as a metaphor for stripping away the masks that keep them afloat in the wider world.
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