17th century
alexandra.coghlan
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.The year is 1610 and plague has driven the wealthy away from London to their country estates, leaving the city and their possessions in charge of the underclass – servants, clerks, whores and Read more ...
David Nice
They dreamed the impossible dream in 1970, turning aspects of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha. But Purcell, Eccles and the lively dramatist Thomas D'Urfey - anyone know his hit song "The Fart"? - got there first nearly 300 years earlier when the Knight of the Woeful Countenance trod the boards at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal in a seven-hour entertainment.Harry Bicket and The English Concert devised a clever programme of joyous early showbusiness homaging the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death - in the same month as Shakespeare's, astonishingly - by interweaving the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.In this monologue of an age, an era in thrall to the selfie and the narcissistic navel-gazing of the blogosphere, our ambitions and loves are turned inwards, but also our fears. It follows that a contemporary Faustus is fascinated Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The BBC Proms is the largest classical music festival in the world – an event whose ambition, accessibility and breadth wouldn’t be possible without the Royal Albert Hall and its capacity of well over 5,000 people. But the building that makes this festival possible, that provides the space for the hundreds of Prommers who fill the arena each evening, is also its biggest curse. Its unwieldy, awkward acoustic is a problem that must be faced and resolved every night, and when it comes to Early Music, it’s a resolution that’s partial at best. This B Minor Mass from Les Arts Florissants was no Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of Queen Christina Vasa of Sweden has been told in opera, novels and on stage. It was first addressed by cinema in 1933 when Greta Garbo played the title role in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. Liv Ullmann then took the part in 1974’s The Abdication.The reasons for the persistent attraction to the story are clear. Christina was six when her father King Gustav II Adolph was killed in battle in 1632. Queen at 18, she studied voraciously and wanted knowledge and literacy for all. In thrall to the ideas of Descartes, she brought him to Sweden. She did not obediently accept Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New England in the 17th century is the primordial soup of American horror: where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hettie Prynne received her Scarlet Letter, the vampire nest in Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot was seeded, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible tested original, hysterical sins. There is a small, parallel English strand including some of its cinema’s most affecting horrors, too – Matthew Hopkins’ Civil War rampage in Witchfinder General, A Field in England, and The Blood On Satan’s Claw’s slightly later, sexually raw tale of a possessed village. The Witch, Robert Eggers’ debut as writer-director Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How often are you charmed by one of Shakespeare’s sylvan romances while literally under a greenwood tree? Even if this summer is proving rather generous with the rough weather, it is an unusual pleasure to wander around a fine woodland garden while Rosalind and Orlando pursue their light-hearted crossdressing courtship in the forest of Arden, and white sheets inked with bad love poems flutter from the trunks of many oak trees.The Crown Estate's Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park is worth a trip for itself, but for the past two midsummers it’s had the additional treat of evening performances Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The huge and gorgeous Titian, The Vendramin Family, c.1540-c.1560, displays a frieze of males of all ages, three or four generations – and an adorable lap dog held close by the youngest boy – in marvellously sumptuous costume. The painting is surrounded with portraits by an ardent admirer of Titian's, Anthony van Dyck, our interest in the Titian deepened by the fact that Van Dyck once owned it. It is but one of the stars of this fascinating sampling of the collecting habits of artists themselves.These consummate portrait painters are separated by nearly a century but we are told that Van Dyck Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.The second episode immediately picks up the baby and runs with it – all the way to a blind wet nurse from whose breast the sinister henchman Marchal (Tygh Runyan) plucks it before attempting Read more ...
Alison Cole
This exquisite exhibition reminds one of the sheer pleasure of looking. It is small – just 22 works in all – but it presents UK audiences, for the first time in almost a generation, with an opportunity to explore the art of Dutch flower painting, spanning nearly 200 years. In our everyday lives we enjoy flowers for their prettiness, their freshness and graceful fragility, but here we can be exhilarated and enraptured by them as well.These works show how gorgeous and profound Dutch flower painting can be. For the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, each picture was a vanitas – a meditation on Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Handel Festival is back, and instead of ploughing their usual furrow of rarely-seen works, this year’s opera is a classic. If the rest of Ariodante doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its two often-excerpted arias (“Dopo Notte” and “Scherza Infida”), then it’s still a deeply satisfying evening of music, with a large cast perfect for showing off the talents of the Royal College of Music’s student performers.James Bonas’s production is a moody affair, distilling Handel’s Scottish setting down to its emotional essentials. There are hints of snow and of the original sea-coast in Read more ...