16th century
Florence Hallett
Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “doors”, would have changed appearance according to the Church calendar, the wings left closed during Lent to be opened again at Easter when the glorious colours of its central image would once again be revealed.To create maximum theatrical effect, the reverse sides of the panels were often decorated in grisaille – as black and white painting was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we find ourselves tangled in here. But Michael Longhurst’s new production for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is so richly cast, its verse-speaking so expressive that we see straight through the often opaque text to the humanity and the humour beneath.After a riotous Pericles and troubled Cymbeline, this third play in Dominic Dromgoole’s farewell quartet Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so few people: created in 2013 for a special performance in Greenwich and now restaged for a week's run in the Royal Opera House's Linbury studio theatre, it will reach a total audience of mere hundreds – but I'd back it for a month or more, and to be a huge hit with theatre-goers as well as dance-lovers.The piece focuses on Elizabeth I, from Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for all 15 years of their existence.The printed programme, for example, mentioned “Francesco Turrisi – harpsichord”, and described in detail the delicious and lengthy agonies of tuning which his 1624 Ruckers copy harpsichord would have gone through prior to the concert; but what it didn't mention was that Turrisi would be spending roughly Read more ...
David Nice
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-restored but still amazing Temple Church whose founder Knights Templar bring Dan Brown fans in droves and an inevitable daily admission fee of a fiver? To these three shrines come most of the best choirs from Britain and further afield, and on the evidence of A Wondrous Mystery on the second evening of the Temple Winter Festival, there’s none more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline – Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy of love and jealousy – at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespeare wrote for the candle-lit, indoor Blackfriars Playhouse, Cymbeline was quite literally made for this space. How disappointing, then, that director Sam Yates proves so wilfully blind to the theatre’s unique spatial and dramatic possibilities, delivering a production that might charitably be called faithful, but which more often feels simply blank.Lighting is a crucial part of the dramatic rhetoric of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other – Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene – until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The demands are great for any theatre, but for the Globe’s tiny, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse they are impossible, freeing director Dominic Dromgoole to ignore spectacle and visual dislocation in favour of an emotionally-driven, chamber take on this late romance.Designer Jonathan Fensom’s visuals may be coherent, and unity underlined in careful cast doublings, but tonally Dromgoole tosses us from mood to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Jessica Swale’s Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with new writing. In concept, it’s everything this unique space should be doing, exploiting the Wanamaker’s physical intimacy and its architecture, placing music on an equal footing with drama, celebrating stories from the age of the theatre itself. In practice, however, Thomas Tallis is neither a satisfying play nor a satisfying concert. Stuck somewhere between the two, it never quite works out what it wants to Read more ...
David Nice
“Sounds a bit depressing,” said several friends when I urged them to attend the theatrical incarnation of The Image of Melancholy, inspirational violinist Bjarte Eike’s award-winning CD with his stunning Norwegian-based group Barokksolistene. Creative melancholy, though, is not the same as stuck depression, and the sequence on the disc was well-balanced with songs and dances as well as superbly engineered sound. The instrumental sheen created equal magic in the wood-resonant surrounds of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last night.It was admirable of Eike to vary the strain and not repeat the CD Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Later this week David Skinner’s Alamire ensemble will collect the Early Music Gramophone Award for The Spy’s Choirbook, but last night it was the group’s follow-up album that was in the spotlight (or rather the candlelight) in a performance at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Anne Boleyn’s Songbook is the central panel of a planned trilogy of releases, with a story every bit as compelling as its predecessor.Skinner’s thesis is simple, reclaiming a songbook currently housed in London’s Royal College of Music as the possession of Anne Boleyn herself. Decades of scholarship have argued Read more ...
Aleks Sierz and Lia Ghilardi
Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current Queen Elizabeth, our The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre tells the compelling story of the movers and shakers, the buildings, the playwrights, the plays and the audiences that make British theatre what it is today. The book covers all the great names – from Shakespeare to Terence Rattigan, by way of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw – and the classic plays, many of which are still revived Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that Shakespeare didn’t quite write. It’s a decision that makes sense of a difficult work on the Globe’s own terms, playing to a summer crowd, but one that also generates its own confusions and inconsistencies.The heat on press night only added to the Breugel-like spirit of Dromgoole’s opening – a smoky, sweaty, bawdy portrait of Vienna lost in lechery Read more ...