17th century
Jessica Duchen
The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.Norburn's Breaking the Rules received its London premiere on Saturday (it has been performed before in various other venues) in the splendid new festival Baroque at the Edge, and it shows us the composer, on the last day Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Simon Schama called the Netherlands’ century of success an "embarrassment of riches". The thrust of Jessie Burton’s lavishly hyped debut novel The Miniaturist is that the Dutch felt guilty about their good fortune, and denied themselves the right to enjoy sugar, spice, and all things nice. The money went on surface things, on finery and furniture. The splendid look of a conflicted culture was beautifully reproduced in BBC One’s adaptation.The miniaturist of the title supplies the newly married Nella Oortman with delicately realised figurines and ornaments to decorate a cabinet-sized copy of Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One of the questions that can be asked of Brecht is whether for a modern audience his Verfremdungseffekt — or alienation effect — still works as intended, provoking genuine reflections on justice by distancing audiences from emotional entanglement with the characters. At a time when verbatim and community theatre is accomplishing just that with exactitude and force, it appears that inducing audiences to think morally is most effective when delivered in unexpected ways. Deeply though Brecht’s work may have influenced these pieces, audiences’ capacity for surprise remains a good Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much is being made of the fact that Kit Harington is not only playing the Gunpowder Plot mastermind Robert Catesby, but is genuinely descended from him (and his middle name is Catesby). However, despite its factual underpinnings and screenwriter Ronan Bennett’s flowery 17th-century dialogue, Gunpowder is drama in a historical vein, rather than nailed-down fact.This first of three episodes (on BBC One, but all are now available on iPlayer) was broody, dark and menacing, history recycled into a Gothicky netherworld. Westminster, 1603 style, was portrayed as a stygian pile on the bank of the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As a line flows or falters, registering each slight change in pressure, pause, or occasional reworking, it seems to offer a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work. The line is the instrument of the artist’s eye, the often unpolished, provisional nature of a drawing offering a spark and freshness that tends to gradually lessen as a composition is rethought and worked up in paint.Portraits only intensify this sense of immediacy, and from likenesses of loved ones hastily dashed off, to awkward first sittings for a commission, such drawings offer an unparalleled sense of encounter with an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How well do you know your British history? Fancy explaining the causes and origins of the Glorious Revolution or listing the members of the Grand Alliance? What about the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement or the Occasional Confirmity Bill of 1702? I ask not because Helen Edmundson’s Queen Anne will require you to know any of this, but rather precisely because it won’t.If there was a Top Trumps of British monarchs Queen Anne wouldn’t be anyone’s pick for a winner. Hers is a corner of the 17th and 18th centuries rarely taught in schools, its political back-and-forth and factional tussling Read more ...
james.woodall
Can The Tempest open on stage without a tempest – of crashing, shrieking and torment – and thus without what can become five minutes-plus of inaudibility? In Gregory Doran’s 2016 Stratford production for the RSC, revived at the Barbican Theatre, the answer is, as so often, no. Joe Shire, Darren Raymond and Caleb Frederick, playing mariners, have lines to deliver but against giant-wave effects and the supersonic demolition of a ship, they might as well stay mute. Not one bellowed word comes through, though Joseph Mydell as the kindly elder Gonzalo makes a good go of it.As a show starts, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. This isn’t simply because their engaging production of Life of Galileo, demonstrating the struggle between science and prevailing authority, is played in the round, but because the audience is such an integral part of the proceedings. To begin with, characters pop up from among spectators sitting in the circle under an enormous ceiling disc which will later act as a cosmic screen or Renaissance dome, but actors also address the audience (even once name-checking the director) as the action Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’Incoronazione di Poppea is almost entirely dedicated to infidelity and ends with a disturbingly beautiful love duet between the adulterous couple, Nero and Poppea, after he has exiled his wife, Ottavia, and ordered his moralising tutor, Seneca, to kill himself, among other equally vicious, if slightly less murderous, diktats.Happily Monteverdi’s only other Read more ...
Will Rathbone
James Shirley is a rarely performed 17th-century playwright whose oeuvre has generally been consigned to theatrical study and research. Written for King Charles I at a time of great political upheaval and with the English Civil War looming, not to mention the shutdown of London theatres, his 1641 play The Cardinal represents Shirley's self-confessed masterpiece. It's an all-but-forgotten work that emerges with renewed clarity and pace thanks to the director Justin Audibert, whose gift for period classics dates back to the RSC's recent The Jew of Malta and well beyond. The revenge drama Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Trimmings, trimmings. They prove the final straw for Molière’s Harpagon in this new adaptation of the classic French comedy-farce. The menu for his wedding banquet – which he doesn’t want to spend a centime more on than he has to – is being concocted by chef-cum-dogsbody, Jacques. Soup, yes; a bit of meat, possibly. But trimmings… The very thought of them provokes a howl of despair from Griff Rhys Jones, who plays The Miser’s titular tight-purse with enormous gusto.Sean Foley’s West End production definitely doesn't hold back on the trimmings, and they’re not just the standard stuffing on-the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in c.1640, David Teniers the Younger’s Boy Blowing Bubbles depicts a theme that would have been entirely familiar to his wife’s great-grandfather, the founder of one of art’s most illustrious dynasties, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Indicating the fleeting nature of life, the motif carries proverbial associations, its moral message one that in the 17th century was understood principally as memento mori. While Bruegel the Elder included depictions of proverbs in his panoramic scenes of peasant life, their meanings discussed and puzzled over by guests in the dining-rooms of Read more ...