Latest 7 magazine

CONGRATULATIONS to all 15 winners of the 2010 Latest Awards, announced at a ceremony at Latest Musicbar (sponsored by new local wine merchants tengreenbottles) on Monday night. Latest 7 reviewed 165 shows across the Brighton Festival and Fringe, and we’re proud to have assembled our most comprehensive judging panel to date – one which reflects the increasing number of media organisations giving Brighton their critical attention throughout May, and engages with the growing diversity of work on offer.

Latest 7 is the only organisation whose awards are decided by a panel from across the media, and we also took into account nearly 400 public nominations made via the Latest 7 website (shouts out to whoever nominated Michael ‘Atters’ Attree in every single category, including Best Female Performer and Best Venue).

Special mention should go to Brighton Festival’s guest curator Brian Eno, who embraced the role so fully he moved to our city for the month, chucking last minute installations into an already generous programme and rejuvenating the Festival for many. Hats off also to Festival performer Sue MacLaine, who was longlisted in the Outstanding Contrubution To The Festival category for her extra-curricular signing of events such as This Is Acapella. Our reviewer praised, ‘her no-holds-barred renditions of songs you’d have thought were uninterpretable!’

One of our runners up in that final category might need some explanation, so here’s Total Theatre’s Dorothy Max Prior: “Peter Chrisp goes to everything everywhere! Theatre, music, open houses… I swear he must be one of triplets, at least – there is no other explanation”. Peter’s nomination is symbolic of the crucial role played in all this by all of you – Brighton Festival and Fringe would be nothing without their audience.

Results 2010 Latest Awards

BEST MALE PERFORMER
Winner – Tim Crouch for I, Malvolio
Runners-up – Joe Bone for Bane II/Robert Cohen for The Trials
Of Harvey Matusow

BEST FEMALE PERFORMER
Winner – Rachel Blackman for Steal Compass, Drive North, Disappear
Runners-up – Philippa Stanton for The Diva In Me/Sarah Leaver for Memoirs Of A Hermaphrodite

BEST MUSIC EVENT
Winner – Apollo: This Is For All Mankind
Runner-up – Cholmondeleys & Featherstonehaughs: Dancing On Your Grave

BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC ACT
Winner – Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra: ‘Mass In B Minor’
Runners-up – Brighton Festival Chorus: Rachmaninov Vespers

BEST CABARET
Winner – Cabaret Whore (Sarah-Louise Young)
Runners-up – Frisky And Mannish/Fire Tusk Pain Proof Circus

BEST THEATRE PERFORMANCE
Winner – Before I Sleep
Runners-up – Steal Compass, Drive North, Disappear
/The Importance Of Being Ernest

BEST COMEDY SHOW
Winner – Andy Thomas: Crimes Against Humanities Teachers
Runners-up – Stephen Grant: Facepalm/Kim Noble: Kim Noble Will Die

BEST INTERNATIONAL ACT
Winner – Circolumbia for Urban
Runners-up – Compagnia Rodisio for Story Of A Family/
Daniel Veronese for Uncle Vanya and Women Dreamt Horses

BEST CHILDREN’S EVENT
Winner – Spoon Tree Productions: LalaLuna
Runners-up – Long Nose Puppets: Penguin/Justin Coe’s The Jumble Book

BEST LITERATURE/WORKSHOP EVENT
Winner – Grit Lit at Redroaster
Runners-up – Altered Egos at Iambic Arts Theatre/Martin Amis at Corn Exchange

BEST OUTDOOR EVENT
Winner – Wili Dorner: Bodies In Urban Spaces
Runners-up – No Fit State: Park Life/Fuel: Electric Hotel /Shakespeare’s Globe on Tour: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

BEST VENUE
Winner – The Basement
Runners-up – Upstairs At Three And Ten/Laughing Horse at
The Temple and The Quadrant

MOST GROUNDBREAKING ACT
Winner – Hofesh Shechter Company for Political Mother
Runners-up – Rimini Protokoll for Best Before/Oneohone Theatre for 101

STAR OF THE FESTIVAL
Winner – dreamthinkspeak
Runners-up – Shirley Jaffe

OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO THE FESTIVAL
Winner – Nicola Haydn (Otherplace Productions)
Runners-up – Peter Chrisp (audience member supreme)
/Alex Petty (Laughing Horse)

The judging panel: Andrea Fox and Guy Lloyd from Juice FM, the Brighton Visitor team, Matthew Cook and The Dome team, Melita Dennett of the BBC, James Ledward for G Scene, Paul Levy and the Fringe Review team, Dorothy Max Prior and the Total Theatre team, Richard Stamp and the Fringe Guru team, The Three Weeks team, Radio Reverb… and of course the Latest 7 team

A series of short, sharply written and wryly monumental stories about what happens when we die, David Eagleman’s Sum: 40 Tales Of The Afterlives was one of the cult hits of 2009 (Canongate have just brought out an audio version featuring the likes of Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker). And in Brian Eno’s exclusive Brighton Festival staging, the author and neuroscientist himself took to the stage – one of 12 readers sat at isolated desks on the Dome stage as if in a sort of purgatorial classroom. Auditioned from community volunteers, the readers varied in skill. Jimmy Cairney of The Bobby McGees did brilliantly with the saddest of the pack, Metamorphosis, in which we all die twice – once corporeally, and once when our name is spoken for the last time on earth. Eno’s omnipresent electro noodling provided a vaguely ominous sound bed, but the thin live concept, fleshed out by an admirably inclusive spirit, was no match to simply reading the book.
Concert Hall, Brighton Dome
3/5
Bella Todd

Like watching one of those frenzied foreign soap operas as filtered through the great thematic mind of Chekhov, this double bill from Argentine writer/director Daniel Veronese had an addictive domestic electricity only Enda Walsh has come close to on the British stage. As two families gathered to discuss their futures in the same tiny flat, fags were stubbed and fists pounded on walls in a cascade of simultaneous emotional unloading. This did mean there was no hope of keeping on top of the surtitles. But I found galloping through Veronese’s blazing script, not entirely secure in my saddle, an exhilirating rather than frustrating experience.
Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, 23 May
4/5
Bella Todd

‘I am a warehouse, not a warhorse. I house the wares, I do not take sides’. At the heart of the latest brave, bold and unavoidably slightly worthy piece from Brighton Theatre was a powerful dramatic street poem, as gifted writer Richard Crane approached the 2009 bombing of a UN refugee store in Gaza from the point of view of the warehouse itself. Anna-Maria Nabirye was a beacon of frank charisma and fierce optimism in the role – even as she burned she insisted, ‘you can’t kill the urge to give’. And the filmed recollections of the UN staffer (who flew over from Gaza for the premiere) were invaluable. But there were two many dimensions here for a show forced together in the last 10 days and, as we were herded through Newhaven Fort’s dank tunnels past stark weaponry installations from Romany Mark Bruce, I felt the familiar insincerity of the site-specific theatre goer queueing up to be ‘moved’.
Newhaven Fort, 21 May
3/5
Bella Todd