FoodFund International to launch Greek restaurant

Hotelier Middle EastFoodFund International to launch Greek restaurantHotelier Middle EastTomazos said to Caterer Middle East: “We have spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect location to suit the Greek concept. We needed size as the first one needed to be iconic; we needed the location to be quite scenic and we needed there to be ...

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Pearls of wisdom from the cleverest Greek

ON FEBRUARY 14 I was patient (or masochistic?) enough to sit through a farce of a show broadcast by the CyBC. The star was some character presenting himself as ‘the cleverest Greek in the world’, who came up with an incredible amount of ...

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An August Bank Holiday Lark; Translations; A Taste of Honey – review

New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme; Crucible, Sheffield; Lyttelton, LondonDramatic irony proves deeply affecting as the domestic and the epic meet in the lives of Lancashire folk in August 1914

An almost empty stage: the edge of a moor suggested by fragments of stone wall; an interior indicated by table and chairs. From next to nothing a world appears. August 1914, the north-west of England, an industrial community (livelihoods depending on the textile mills) is preparing its annual summer celebration. A lad paints a banner for the Rushcart festival. The "Squire" of the morris men flies into a fury because the flowers he's been growing to decorate his hat on the big day have been eaten by neighbour JU's escaped chickens – they haven't spoken since the last time she let them get away, three years ago. The Squire's daughter is secretly walking out with JU's son. He is a brilliant but dangerously innovative dancer ("There's no call for artistic expression!"), too scared to ask Squire's permission to court his daughter.

Local gossip and squabbles about whether women should be allowed to join the dance (in smaller and larger senses) are interspersed with snippets of further-off affairs: recruiting bands are playing in nearby towns – "Arthur Barraclough's taken the shilling!" The young men's eyes shine. We know, as the characters do not, that this war will not be An August Bank Holiday Lark (the title is taken from a line in Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV). Even as the life of the community unfurls vividly before us, it is ripped to shreds: the young men leave to fight, the women take over their work and the world changes irrevocably.

Writer Deborah McAndrew uses the audience's knowledge of events to add texture to this deceptively simple script. It's a potentially dangerous tactic: dramatic irony is cloying if overused. McAndrew avoids this by skilfully interweaving three time strands: the linear time lived by the community on the stage, the vertical time of history and the cyclical time of seasons and rituals. The result is simultaneously domestic and epic: events in a particular place and time become the expression of universal experience of the effects of war. It is deeply affecting.

An August Bank Holiday Lark is McAndrew's fifth piece for Northern Broadsides. It's Broadsides' sixth co-production with the New Vic (set and costumes by their resident designer, Lis Evans). Artistic director Barrie Rutter dreamed up the brief for the piece, which he directs, and in which he delivers a truly outstanding performance as the Squire (fury, grief, joy, desolation – all breathtakingly intense). Resident director Conrad Nelson weaves music and choreography seamlessly into the action. Four of the 12-strong cast have performed with the company before; all sing, dance (complicated morris footwork and patterns), play instruments and portray convincing, textured, multilayered characters (special mentions for Darren Kuppan and Emily Butterfield as the courting couple, and Mark Thomas making his first professional appearance). This is popular ensemble theatre in traditions stretching from Molière to Meyerhold and beyond: vibrant, entertaining and meaningful.

Brian Friel's 1980 Translations also uses the audience's awareness of history, but his format is that of a "thesis play". He sets up an idea and works through it by way of situation and characters (Ben Jonson-ish to Northern Broadsides's Shakespeare-ish). Here, in this Sheffield, English Touring and Rose Kingston theatres co-production, community tradition is revealed not through songs and dances, but in names and language. It's 1833 and the British army is mapping Ireland in order better to administer the country (ie, more efficiently collect taxes). Part of the exercise involves replacing "incomprehensible" Gaelic place names with others easier for anglophone ears and tongues (further rationalisation will establish compulsory schooling, available only in English).

Questions raised by the text – around ideas of colonisation as domination; identity as an individual and collective construct; civilisation as a shifting term depending on viewpoint – stand out clearly in James Grieve's production. The setting is stark. In the background stands a realistic barn/home of rough stone, with wooden stairs clinging to its side; before it stretches the playing area, wide and deep and charcoal grey (Lucy Osborne's design). This is the site of a "hedge school" where "the Master" (a roaring tour de force from Niall Buggy) and his younger son instruct local youths and adults in Homer's Greek, times tables and everything in between. Normal life is interrupted by the arrival of a British captain, his lieutenant and their translator – elder son of the Master – and (offstage) troops.

Grieve plots the movements of his actors with precision. He makes sure that each character strongly conveys the idea they represent (James Northcote's corporal with his Tiggerishly energetic – bounding into the air – naive enthusiasm for all things Irish, and growing attraction for Máire, for instance; Beth Cooke's Máire, expressing her longing for a wider world of possibilities). The device of having Irish-speakers and English-speakers failing to understand one another while all speaking English succeeds beautifully.

What was lacking was the emotional intensity of, for instance, the National Theatre's 2004 touring version, directed by Sean Holmes. Without it, the situation is more interesting than engrossing, the ideas less urgently compelling. This coolly intelligent production promises deepening complexity as the run develops.

The National Theatre's new production of Shelagh Delaney's 1958 hit A Taste of Honey is a puzzle. In the first place: why do it? It was attention-grabbing when Joan Littlewood produced it at Stratford East in 1958: written by a little-educated Salford teenager – and a girl, at that; featuring a flighty, sexually active single mother; interracial, underage sex; pregnancy; intimations of paedophilia, homosexuality and, perhaps most shocking of all, a working-class, northern setting. It's a lively script, but now that TV soaps regularly cover all these issues it seems less satisfying as a stage drama. A revival makes us look back in wonder at the parochialism of the mid-20th century London theatre that found it so extraordinary.

In the second place: if you are going to do it, why do it like this? A production by Jo Combes at Manchester Royal Exchange in 2008 communicated the strengths of the play by precisely unpicking the layers of emotion striating mother and daughter's fraught relationship. Here, under Bijan Sheibani's direction, the emphasis is heavily on comedy; at times, it seems, anything goes, so long as it raises a laugh. This plays oddly against Hildegard Bechtler's set of dreary streets, distant gas tower and squalid sitting room; its close attention to realistic detail contrasts with the artificiality of the actors' cartoon-style movement. Lesley Sharp as the mother is most extreme – hips heading one way, shoulders another, head jabbing on an alternative plane.

This would be terrific in a Restoration comedy; here, it constrains the character. It's as if the director doesn't trust the play to be interesting without extreme exaggeration. And yet there are terrific moments – Sharp, again, in stricken moments showing the horror beneath the mother's mask of self-interested insouciance; the scenes between Kate O'Flynn as her teenage, pregnant daughter and Harry Hepple as the diffident gay friend. These suggest there's more to Sheibani's vision than is currently realised in a production struggling to free itself from an over-ponderous concept.

Star ratings (out of 5)An August Bank Holiday Lark *****Translations ****A Taste of Honey ***

TheatreNational TheatreShelagh DelaneyFirst world warIrelandClare Brennantheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Venizelos: “The Situation in Greece has Changed”

A meeting between Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and his junior partner in the ruling coalition, government vice-president, Foreign Minister and PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos, was held on Saturday afternoon to discuss the economy and the ...

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Greece Athena gets past Bishop Kearney

Greece Athena gets past Bishop KearneyRochester Democrat and ChronicleGreece Athena, which seemed to breeze through most of its regular-season schedule, overcame some difficulties and turned back a challenge from Bishop Kearney on Saturday to win a Section V Class AA tournament quarterfinal, 71-62. “Very good team ...

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Greek Gods await Moyes

The weakest team left in the Champions League are just about its sturdiest domestic kings.

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Ukraine Parliament Votes To Oust Yanukovich, Sets May Election

* Events move rapidly after 82 killed in Kiev fighting * Changes would bring Ukraine closer to West * Kiev parliament sets early election for May 25 * Opposition leader Tymoshenko freed from prison * Yanukovich gives TV interview from Kharkiv in northeast By Pavel Polityuk and Matt Robinson KIEV, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Ukraine's parliament voted on Saturday to remove President Viktor Yanukovich, who abandoned his Kiev office to protesters and denounced what he described as a coup after a week of fighting in the streets of the capital. Parliament also freed his arch-nemesis, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who walked free from the hospital where she had been jailed, completing a radical transformation in the former Soviet republic of 46 million people. The apparent toppling of the pro-Russian leader, after bloodshed in Kiev that saw 82 people killed and the centre of the capital transformed into an inferno, looks likely to pull Ukraine away from Moscow's orbit and closer to Europe. It is also a stark reversal for Russian President Vladimir Putin's dream of recreating as much as possible of the Soviet Union in a new Eurasian Union, in which Moscow had counted on Yanukovich to deliver Ukraine as a central member. Members of the Ukrainian parliament, which abandoned Yanukovich after this week's bloodshed, stood, applauded and sang the national anthem after it declared the president constitutionally unable to carry out his duties and set an early election for May 25. "POLITICAL KNOCKOUT" "This is a political knockout," opposition leader and retired world boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko told reporters. Moments later, opposition leader Tymoshenko waved to supporters from a car as she was driven out of the hospital in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where she has been treated for a bad back while serving a seven-year sentence since 2011. In a television interview which the station said was also conducted in Kharkiv, Yanukovich said he would not resign or leave the country, and called decisions by parliament "illegal". "The events witnessed by our country and the whole world are an example of a coup d'etat," he said, comparing it to the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in the 1930s. He said he had also come under fire. "My car was shot at. I am not afraid. I feel sorrow for my country," he told UBR television. Interfax news agency said Yanukovich was refused exit from the country by border guards when he tried to fly out from the city of Donetsk. At Yanukovich's abandoned secret estate near Kiev, people flocked to take photographs of his private zoo with ostriches and deer, replica ancient Greek ruins, and lavish waterways and follies. Despite Yanukovich's defiance, the dismantling of his authority seemed all but complete, with his cabinet promising a transition to a new government, the police declaring themselves behind the protesters and his arch-rival Tymoshenko going free. Setting herself immediately on a collision course with Moscow, Tymoshenko said she was sure her country would join the European Union in the near future. Her release was welcomed by Washington. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said "illegal extremist groups are refusing to disarm and in fact are taking Kiev under their control with the connivance of opposition leaders". "DON'T STOP YET" As night fell, 30,000 opposition supporters on Kiev's Independence Square, scene of nearly three months of protests, were in buoyant mood. "People can taste freedom and take off their flak jackets," said Vasily, 40, a builder. There was sadness too as coffins were displayed in front of the crowd and priests said prayers. People crossed themselves in front of makeshift shrines with candles and pictures of the dead. Two captured water cannon trucks were parked in the square like trophies of war. In an emotional speech after she was carried on to a stage in a wheelchair, Tymoshenko told the protesters on the square, known as the Maidan: "You have no right to leave the Maidan ... Don't stop yet." The Ukrainian cabinet said it was committed to a responsible transfer of power. Ukrainian military and police leaders said they would not get involved in any internal conflict. The interior ministry responsible for the police said it served "exclusively the Ukrainian people and fully shares their strong desire for speedy change". Yanukovich, who enraged much of the population by turning away from the European Union to cultivate closer relations with Russia three months ago, made sweeping concessions in a deal brokered by European diplomats on Friday after days of street battles that saw police snipers gun down protesters. But the deal, which called for early elections by the end of the year, was not enough to satisfy pro-Europe demonstrators on Independence Square, who wanted Yanukovich out immediately in the wake of the bloodletting. On Saturday, the speaker of parliament, a Yanukovich loyalist, resigned and parliament elected Oleksander Turchynov, a close ally of Tymoshenko, as his replacement. "Today he left the capital," Klitschko said of Yanukovich at an emergency session of parliament. "Millions of Ukrainians see only one choice - early presidential and parliamentary elections." TYMOSHENKO FREE The release of Tymoshenko transforms Ukraine by giving the opposition a single leader and potential future president, although Klitschko and others also have claims. The 53-year-old, known for her distinctive blonde braid, was jailed by a court under Yanukovich over a natural gas deal with Russia she arranged while serving as premier before he took office. The EU had long considered her a political prisoner, and her freedom was one of the main demands it had for closer ties with Ukraine during years of negotiations that ended when Yanukovich abruptly turned towards Moscow in November. She had served as a leader of the "Orange Revolution" of mass demonstrations which overturned a fraudulent election victory for Yanukovich in 2004, but after a divisive term as prime minister she lost to him in an election in 2010. Underscoring Ukraine's regional divisions, leaders of Russian-speaking eastern provinces loyal to Yanukovich voted to challenge anti-Yanukovich steps by the central parliament. Eastern regional bosses meeting in Kharkiv - the city where Yanukovich had apparently sought refuge - adopted a resolution saying parliament's moves "in such circumstances cause doubts about their ... legitimacy and legality. "Until the constitutional order and lawfulness are restored ... we have decided to take responsibility for safeguarding the constitutional order, legality, citizens' rights and their security on our territories." Kharkiv Governor Mikhaylo Dobkin told the meeting: "We're not preparing to break up the country. We want to preserve it." In Russia, Mikhail Margelov, head of the foreign policy committee of the upper house of parliament, said the Kharkiv meeting proved "that the Maidan and the opposition, let alone the militants, are not the majority of the Ukrainian people". But the head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia's lower house, Alexei Pushkov, seemed to acknowledge that Yanukovich's rule was finished. "He fled. Security fled. Staff fled," Pushkov said. "A sad end to the president." (Additional reporting by Matt Robinson in Kiev, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow and Marcin Goettig in Warsaw; Writing by Peter Graff and Giles Elgood; Editing by Andrew Roche)

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