Morning:
9°c
NEW: GPs urged to stop prescribing antibiotics for coughs and colds as overuse is increasing resistance to them, making it more difficult to tackle serious infections like hospital bugs
More...
With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
Sarah Frater's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Craig Refel Horwood.
Cast: Karen Ruimy, Manuel Gutierrez Cabello, Jerome Zerbi, Jose Castro, Fabien Hannot, Francisco Hidalgo, Noe Barroso Gonzalez, Jose Manuel Alvarez, Luis Casado Rodriguez, Majorie Ascione, Sharon Sultan, Immaculada Aranda Espedjos, Pascale Franco
Description: A flamenco-based show staged by Craig Revel Horwood, a love story between three people, set around a bordello.
Trains: Tube: Piccadilly Circus 
Phone: 0207087 7599
Website: www.nimaxtheatres.com
Celebrating violence: Jeremy Braitbart and Marjorie Ascione
Popular flamenco shows have long been a fixture on the West End. Few offer the artistry you find at serious venues (Sadler’s Wells, for instance). Few offer flamenco at all but nobody much minds if the dancing is gutsy and no one gets hurt.
Craig Revel Horwood has, via Strictly Come Dancing, achieved the status of national treasure. He is sharp-witted and smiley-eyed, and you trust him to stage a quality knees-up. Which is why the frankly dodgy Flamenco Flamen’ka is such a surprise.
You think it will be like the flamenco flounce-arounds we know and love. Instead, it’s a show about two brothers who knock their shared girlfriend around, oversee her gang rape in a brothel then knife her to death. There are also women in cat fights, women being pushed around, and women crawling on their knees, begging the men not to leave them.
Does anyone think this a good idea? I don’t mean from a moral perspective, or even one of taste. Is it entertaining to depict women being slapped about and begging for more? It so obviously isn’t that you can’t believe such a show got to the West End.
To say that many of the dancers were weak, and the musicians so‑so, seems trivial but I should report it was the case. Much of the music sounded like Madonna on paella, and the dancers were stiff and clumsy.
Two of the women were pleasingly plump and bendy, but you couldn’t enjoy their curves as they were being knocked around so much.
The acting was universally woeful, and the two brothers looked more like EastEnders’ Grant and Phil Mitchell than the erotic heroes they wanted to be.
Worse still was Karen Ruimy, who devised the show. She mooches around narrating the action and wishing she looked like Penelope Cruz (she doesn’t). What she does do is sing very, very badly.
The only good thing about the show was the set, an evocative Spanish square, and the only entertainment was unintentional.
After the heroine has been knifed, three women waft around her body in the style of Isadora Duncan, then attempt to carry her off. However, she is a well upholstered lady, and they struggle, leaving you thinking someone really might get hurt.
Until 13 Nov (0844 412 4661)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I couldn't disagree more with the above reviewers. Most of thesepeople should have gone to see a nice, proper, British musical where neighbours chit chat politely while pruning the roses, sip tea and eat cucumber sandwiches while brushing any inconvenient feelings under the carpet all performed to the strains of "Always look on the Bright Side of Life, de dum, de dum, de dum de dum..." and so forth. We're laying bare a whole British neurosis here - our discomfort with strong, dark feelings, our denial of the dark side of ourselves and of life, our sexual hang ups, our fear of passion and its consequences.
The plot is incidental, a two year old toddler could tell you that. It isn't about the plot, it's about the dancing. As far I'm concerned, the flamenco was served up just the way I like it - dangerous, free, dark, spontaneous, blood red with passion, as intense as nature intended it.
At last, we have women performing on a West End stage who look like real women, who other women can relate to. The female lead dancer was totally personified the intense flaming animal passion of flamenco - absolutely possessed, hypnotic, riveting. It is a sad day for us emotionally constipated Brits that this passes us by and we cannot see beyond the superficial, the literal and the prudish.
- Lee Knights, London
The turn by Miss Ruimy needs to be seen to be believed. It is by a huge degree the most amateurish performance I have seen on the West End professional stage in 40 years of theatre going. I can only surmise that Mr Revel Horwood was contractually constrained from telling his "star" that she cannot sing and that, if she could once dance, she can do so no more. If he is in any way responsible for the excrutiating script, he should vow now to never write another word for the stage. As for the female dancers, whilst it would be charitable to gloss over their efforts, it has to be said that one particularly inelegant largish lady, with a strange bobbed wig, seemed like a refugee from a pastiche of Cabaret. Whilst the male dancing was in parts impressive, and the set attractive, the story was so slender and distasteful and the quality of acting so poor that there was no dramatic tension or progression. Some film directors have been known to have removed their name from the credits rather than be associated with the final product. I am surprised Mr Revel Horwood has left his name in print on the programme - and astonished as to how such a vanity project by Miss Ruimy was given theatrical exposure.
- Tony Leek, London
I took a friend along to see the show with me. In hind sight should have not bothered. What a waste of time and money. It was an amature production that should have not been on teh West End. A mess from beginning to end. As for the curtain call. Not sure why they had bothered.
Craig should stick to TV. Not even worth 1 poiint.
- Sean Mc, Oakwood London
Was given a ticket for Flamenco Flamen'ka from my sister as a birthday gift. Wonderful I thought!! We were both excited we couldn't wait to see the show.........sat it the theatre anticipating what we were about to see. Dramatic start, wonderful setting but then leading lady started to sing or couldn't ! She was out of tune and thought she was the greatest thing on earth. It was set in a brothel of all things. Women being abused, raped whilst the leading lady tried to dance flamenco. The men spent the whole show attacking each other with a knife. Rather disgusting when there was a march to Hyde Park that day re the increasing knife crime. We found the whole show distasteful and rubbish! At some points some of the audience were giggling including my sister and I yet it wasn't meant to be a comedy!! Craig Revel Horwood must be blind and deaf!!
- Ana Suarez, Southgate London
