19th century
Macbeth, Royal OperaTuesday, 24 May 2011
The staging smacks of Covent Garden's familiar Verdi-by-numbers - surprising since it's the often inventive Phyllida Lloyd's concept, revived by Harry Fehr, but it might as well be the inert pageantry of Elijah Moshinsky - while the necessary... Read more... |
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 22 May 2011
So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year... Read more... |
The School for Scandal, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 21 May 2011
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly... Read more... |
The Damnation of Faust, English National OperaFriday, 06 May 2011
Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-... Read more... |
Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, CardiffSaturday, 30 April 2011
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present... Read more... |
Filthy Cities, BBC TwoTuesday, 19 April 2011
Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in... Read more... |
Meek's CutoffThursday, 14 April 2011
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and... Read more... |
If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home, BBC FourThursday, 14 April 2011
I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of... Read more... |
Brontë, Tricycle TheatreWednesday, 06 April 2011
“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found... Read more... |
The Crimson Petal and the White, BBC TwoWednesday, 06 April 2011
Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll... Read more... |
The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, V&ASaturday, 02 April 2011
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of... Read more... |
Fidelio, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 29 March 2011
I have no problem at all with updating Beethoven's early-19th-century paean to love and liberty: there are any number of tyrants and prisoners of conscience to whom its universal message could apply. But in this revival staged by Daniel Dooner,... Read more... |
