19th century
Jasper Rees
The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose.It’s not been a good period for period on the BBC. Since the ladies of Cranford hung up their bonnets, Upstairs Downtairs trailing oodles of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's sad, isn't it, that we still live in a world where the more something sounds like a great party, the less “serious” it is considered? Think about how much deep meaning is attached by how many to, say, the portentous mitherings of Thom Yorke, then try to imagine that degree of beard-rubbing analysis being given over to this non-stop blast of joyous grooves that have rocked festival stages, dance clubs and hip hop shows over the summer. Not gonna happen, is it?It's a shame, because there is so much depth in those grooves. Their rowdy, complex sonorities come out of the unbroken living Read more ...
judith.flanders
The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.TR Warszawa, too, has a theatrical pedigree. In London the company appeared two years ago to acclaim in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis Read more ...
bruce.dessau
A revival of an old play with a broad sense of fun and a turbo-charged role for a co-star of hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey? No, not One Man, Two Guvnors, but this well-dressed production of the classy 1892 farce by Brandon Thomas starring Mathew Horne. One cannot help thinking that the Menier is hoping that this might do for Horne what One Man... did for James Corden. I doubt if this will make it to Broadway, but it certainly deserves to make it to a bigger London theatre.The Chocolate Factory's stage is so crowded with Victorian props it almost feels as if the front rows are actually in the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Let one visual artist and one fashion designer loose on a theatre production and you may find both set and costumes upstaging the actors. Laurent P. Berger has designed a Miers Van der Rohe-type modernist glass box, with luxurious white surfaces and Dan Flavin-esque tube lighting, while Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz has dressed the star, Juliette Binoche, in a show-stopping full-length gold-sequinned number slashed to the thigh. Binoche certainly shines as a rather physically languorous Mademoiselle Julie, but not in the way one might have hoped for the Oscar-winning actress. Part of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”. But for all the deliberate theatrical artifice of a movie about a society that knows a thing or two about putting itself on display, the delicious paradox of the occasion is this: in framing his Tolstoy adaptation as if it were a piece of theatre, Wright has made the least stagey film imaginable.Staginess, in any case, has less to do with sets than a state of mind, and there’s no doubt from the off that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”Apparently it was all a question of budget. Denied expansive tracking shots of snow-covered vistas and bustling St Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Before Ibsen was, well, Ibsen, he had a successful career as a failed playwright. Producing works on a spectrum between unremarkable and outright bad, he muddled his way through to his late thirties when the publication of Brand derailed what might otherwise have been a spectacularly mediocre life’s work. With the change in fortunes came a change in tone – a welcome and necessary one if the leaden comedy of Ibsen’s early pastoral satire St John’s Night is anything to go by.Inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ibsen’s play subjects the collision between man and magic to a Read more ...
bella.todd
"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.A rarely-seen drawing-room comedy about a put-upon vicar tempted into risking money and reputation on a horse, Dandy Dick was partly written in Brighton and possibly inspired by its racecourse. Hence its selection to launch Theatre Royal Brighton Productions which, under artistic director Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s place names that he used them for some of the characters – Berwick, Carlisle, Darlington, Jedburgh. They do seem to lend themselves to titles - we could have had Lady Coniston or Lord Buttermere or Countess Rydal Water. But we got Lady Windermere, which has become part of the language, with that fan, a present from her husband on her 21st birthday, when the play opens.The four-act play is like a Carlton House Read more ...