Latest news with #Splott
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Jess Fishlock mural unveiled in Cardiff for Wales star
A mural of Wales' record-breaking goal scorer Jess Fishlock has been tribute, which covers the playing area of a five-a-side football pitch in Splott, Cardiff, celebrates her impact on football, equality and is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe for a female footballer and was showcased ahead of Wales' debut in Switzerland for Euro 2025 after the team qualified for a first major tournament in their mural is designed by artist Regan Gilflin, and brought to life by UNIFY, the Welsh creative studio behind My City, My Shirt and the Gary Speed mural. Fishlock - who has 162 caps and 47 international goals to her name - has been called a footballing "icon" by Wales boss Rhian made history by breaking Wales' all-time goal scoring record during her team's 2-0 win over Kosovo during the Euro 2025 year the midfielder also accepted an Honorary Fellowship from Aberystwyth University. Fishlock, who was born in Cardiff, said she enjoyed sports as a child but her love for football developed at a Mia Hamm soccer camp in the city during the summer previously said: "My older sister wanted to go to the camp and my mum said for me to go along with her."I just loved it and my mum says from that moment I was like, 'I'm not doing anything else, this is what I want to do."She played for Cardiff City Ladies FC from the age of 15 then, at 19 while playing for Wales, Fishlock was approached to move to Holland to play professionally for AZ Alkmaar. When the Women's Super League launched in 2011, she returned to the UK and joined Bristol and that year she was named the FAW's Women's Player of the 2012 she moved to Australia and joined Melbourne Victory before making her move to the US with Seattle Reign described the levels of the National Women's Soccer League as higher due to the "sheer intensity, physicality and mentality".In 2018 she received an MBE for services to women's football and the LGBT has spoken openly about her sexuality, saying her experiences growing up made her determined to be a role model in the LGBT community, especially children, after high school was "hell on earth" for 2019, she celebrated helping Lyon win the French women's league then, in April 2024, became the first Welsh player to reach 150 caps.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ghosts review – gasps and laughter greet this modern revamp of Ibsen's shocker
When Henrik Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881 – plays then were often released as texts with no production scheduled – the content (sexual transgression, venereal disease, suicide) so shocked many booksellers that they banned it. The book was reviewed in newspapers but with such fury that no Norwegian theatre would stage it; Chicago hosted the world premiere the following year. The playwright was so shaken that he wrote a great drama about ostracism, An Enemy of the People. Almost a century and a half later, and with anything going in most areas of life, it's tough for a modern production to still deliver a Ghosts spooked by taboos. But Rachel O'Riordan's staging of Gary Owen's new version achieves it. 'Complete silence would, in our opinion, be the most fitting reception for this work,' said one late 19th-century media critique. Turning this into a compliment, the 2025 theatre was filled with intense attention, broken by loud gasps at plot twists and laughter for dark jokes implicit in the original but spoken louder here. Owen and O'Riordan memorably relocated Euripides to modern Cardiff in Iphigenia in Splott and similarly update Ghosts. Helen Alving becomes Helena, still the guilt-haunted widow of a local hero, though honouring him not with an orphanage but a hospital funded by private equity. Her troubled artist son, Oswald, turns into Oz, an actor short on auditions. The Alving's maid, Regina, and carpenter father, Jacob, retain their relationship and roles, though she goes by Reggie. In the most striking modernisation, Pastor Manders, the creepy priest, becomes an agnostic management consultant, Andersen, whose church is Zoom and his bible workplace guidelines. The original contains (1881 plot-spoiler) a strand about assisted dying that is hotly topical now. Owen boldly jettisons that and the VD theme but still constructs a shocking plot around guilt, consent and, drawing audible shock, a plot line overlapping with season three of HBO's The White Lotus. The play's theme of terrible familial and social inheritance survives in jagged dialogue that gives 'home' and 'safe' dark new meanings. Ghosts exemplifies Ibsen's creed that the key events of a play take place before it starts: everyone is either hiding, or having hidden, something from them. The actors grippingly chart the negotiation of these secrets and suspicions. Victoria Smurfit's Helena shows how the greater agency of a modern Mrs Alving has not prevented moral compromises but also allows her contemporary solutions. Callum Scott Howells as Oz is sassy, sarcastic but ecstatic at the prospect even of dangerous love. Patricia Allison's confident, rebellious Reggie movingly becomes the story's core of common decency. Rhashan Stone plausibly makes a corporate fixer the equivalent of a sanctimonious cleric and Deka Walmsley's Jacob trails the exhaustion of a man who has kept quiet to survive. Crucially, this Ghosts, retaining the toxic power of the original, will grip whether you know the play or don't. At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 10 May
