Madonna speaks about pain of adoption

Singer Madonna has spoken about the "painful" struggle that she went through while adopting her son David from Malawi.
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, the singer said that she was happy to be a "guinea pig" in the hope of easing future adoptions for other people.
Madonna is currently waiting for a High Court to decide on whether her adoption of David is legal, after claims that it does not conform with international conventions and procedures under the country's law.
"Up until this time there wasn't an adoption law, so consequently I'm sort of the template or the role model, so to speak, for future adoptions," she said.
"Hopefully after we get through this adoption it will be easier for other people to adopt children and I'm happy to be the guinea pig," she said.
The singer was presenting the film 'I Am Because We Are', a documentary about the plight of children in Malawi.
Speaking about her adoption struggle, she said: "Yes it was painful and it was a big struggle and I didn't understand it, but in the end I rationalised that when a woman has a child and goes through natural child birth she suffers an enormous amount."
"So I sort of went through my own kind of birthing pains dealing with the press on my front doorstep and accusing me of kidnapping or whatever you want to call it. In the end it made me stronger so I can't complain."

A Night at the Chinese Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

A Night at the Chinese Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

A tank's gun drum looms into vista in the first few proceedings of Scottish Opera's freshly production of Judith Weir's first opera house, sweeping a porcelain vase to the ground. A Night at the Chinese Opera may be localise in 14th-century provincial Nationalist China when the area was threatened by Kublai Khan, simply, as the matter of fact blending of historical periods and styles in Lee Blakeley's staging (with designs by Jean-Marc Puissant) implies, repression and savagery take in been constants in the country's history. Such concerns, though, ar truly hardly a backcloth to Weir's wry, witty and poisonous nightshade drama, with its neat nesting of i tale, the Chinese opera performed in the instant play, inside another, and whose story lines tellingly converge. Though get-go performed in 1987, this is the work's stage premiere in Weir's native Scotland, and after to a greater extent than 20 days, it is still the perfective tense unification of her text and music that dazzles, with not a gesture wasted.










With Singan Jonathan Edwards conducting, that deadly lucidness is terrifically conveyed. The Scots Opera Orchestra shows how preciously every greenback is, and row make out crosswise so sharply, the English surtitles are to a greater extent than unremarkably redundant. Just the score's economy creates its own problems for a director. Blakeley's knockabout staging of the Chinese opera is deftly hilarious, with Rebekah de Pont Davies outstanding as the leader of the acting troupe. In that location ar approximately alright performances elsewhere, too (Duke of Edinburgh Salmon's alright turns as the watcher world Health Organization overlooks the Mongolian invasion and as a imitation Italian Marco Polo; Fiona Kimm's cameos as a housekeeper and hag), merely the continuity of the outer acts does non constantly register quite neatly as it should.· Farther performances on Saturday, and May 20 & 22. Box office: 0870 060 6647. And then touring.