INTERVIEW: Is there a cure for love? In her first play, Emma Burnell tries to find an answer to this eternal question
It’s the debut play by journalist and political consultant Emma Burnell, who also makes her directorial debut with the premiere production, starring Wendy Morgan and Stephen Russell, with musical direction by Jordan Brown.
No Cure for Love is set in a dingy backstage dressing room at the Broadstairs Folk Festival. Fading musicians Scott and Rose share space and history, flirty banter and vicious jabs. Both as lost as each other, neither of them have yet found the truth behind the love they have sung about all their lives.
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Community Connections across London Generations
Ten years ago today – Wednesday 6 May, 2010 – Alex Smith met the man who would change his life and send it in a completely new direction.
At the time, Alex was knocking on Fred’s door to ask him to vote for him in his unsuccessful bid to become a councillor in Islington. Fred was 84, and though he had never previously missed an election, mobility issues meant he had been stuck in his house for three months and didn’t feel able to get to the polling station. In all that time, he hadn’t seen anyone except the carer who came in to get him breakfast.
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Agata Siwiak and Joanna Wichowska in conversation with Emma Burnell
meet Agata Siwiak in the glamorous downstairs bar and cabaret space at Teatr Polski in Poznan. It is the second day of the festival for which she is the artistic director, The ‘Close Strangers’ festival – which is putting on plays every night for a week either about the Ukrainian experience in Poland or by Ukrainian artists – in their own language and translated into Polish through subtitles.
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Vulnerability is Massively Important – Interview with Owen Kingston of Parabolic
Owen Kingston looks like a pirate king. Even in a small coffee shop dashing between engagements, he looks larger than life and like he should be brandishing a cutlass (very unfair, given he is incredibly sweet natured).
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"We're goldplating Labour policy" Emma Burnell interviews Alex Sobel MP
It’s unusual for me to meet Alex Sobel dressed in a suit. Before he became an MP we were occasional gig buddies, and so I’m more used to the regulation jeans and T-shirt. But today, relaxing in his Parliamentary office, Alex looks every inch the MP.
One week from when this interview will be published, it will be Open Labour’s AGM and conference at which we will be launching the new pamphlet edited by myself and Allison Roche of Unison and with a Foreword by Alex. In it Open Labour lay out the options available to the Party over Europe and argue strongly in favour of staying in both the Customs Union and the Single Market.
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'People feel forgotten - we have to be a voice for them' Interview with Rosie Duffield MP
Poor Rosie Duffield has had to put up with me drunkenly explaining how much her win in Canterbury meant to me more than once over the months she’s been their MP. It was where I voted for the first time in 1997. While Labour won big that night, we didn’t quite sweep Canterbury along with the nation. She’s always listened and responded with perfect charm and I don’t think I’m the only person so have articulated how important her victory felt last June.
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There's Something to be Said for Life Experience: Interview with Jo Platt MP
While Jo Platt is off buying us both a much-needed coffee from the Portcullis House café, her new boss Angela Rayner walks by, stopping for a quick chat. “She’s a bloody superstar,” says the Shadow Secretary of State for Education “she’s keeping us in line”.
It’s unusual to become a PPS (one rung down from a junior shadow minister) so soon after being elected. But it’s quite clear from the passion that Platt shows when discussion education at every level as well as the mutual respect between her and Rayner (who she describes warmly as “an absolute force” and working with her as “the perfect opportunity”) that she’s hit the Parliamentary estate running.
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