Dea Birkett
Oh for the open road! Who doesn’t want to abandon the suffocating suburbs – waking to an alarm at the same time every single morning, hearing brown envelopes pushed through the front door, filling the dishwasher, paying that damned mortgage – and head out for endless sunsets falling over infinitely empty land? Nomadland, starring Frances …
The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced swingeing cuts to its curatorial team and a complete overhaul of its collections. No longer are they going to be arranged by subject matter, but chronologically. Among those earmarked to be reordered into centuries, rather than categories, is its Theatre and Performance department. Presumably Shakespeare’s First Folio will be …
Until the American election, few outside the island of Ireland could point to Mayo on the map. Far from the maddening film crowd of West Cork, where director David Puttnam’s and actor Jeremy Irons’s crew hang out, Mayo isn’t favoured by the fashionable. […]
The circus company founded by Churchill Fellow Dea Birkett (CF 1993), Circus250, has won a prestigious Fantastic for Families Award. This is in recognition of Circus250’s show for families, StrongWomen Science, which received the award in the Best Family Event category in September. “Winning the Fantastic for Families Best Event Award is a wonderful endorsement …
They’re one of the country’s most famous married couples. You just need to spot his colourful jester outfit and the long tassle bobbing from his sugarloaf hat, and you know it’s Mr Punch and his wife Judy. But now, with the Covid restrictions, this familiar sideshow is under threat. Mr Punch may be swinging his …
Big tops are being built up across the UK. With sidewalls raised and seats spaced out, tented circuses are resuming summer tours. Heavy theatre doors, meanwhile, remain shut. But there’s a simple solution to opening up with socially distanced productions. Theatres should take to tents. One has already had the imagination to move out. Norwich …
It’s been a promising week for museums. In Denmark, Germany and Australia some of their most famous galleries – Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum – will all be open within a week. In the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport established a taskforce ‘paving the …
In my local Kennington Park, usually a place of much bustle and some tussles, it’s so strangely quiet you can hear the creaking doors of the now infrequent 133 on the once-busy road alongside. The playground is chained shut and the swings are still, the café for croissants and cappuccino closed. We can’t kick a …