royalty
stephen.walsh
Why is Un Ballo in maschera not as popular as the trio of Verdi masterpieces – Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore – that, with a couple of digressions, preceded it in the early 1850s? Its music is scarcely less brilliant than theirs, and if its plot is on a par of absurdity with Trovatore’s, it is at least, on the whole, more fun. One problem might be a certain thinness in the portraiture, as if Verdi was more interested in the incidents than in his characters. In his new production for WNO, David Pountney seems to interpret this as a sort of meta-theatricality, an opera watching itself being Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) dresses as a woman while dancing with her gentlewomen in her private quarters. Straining credibility, Mary is even tolerant when, on her wedding night, Darnley takes Rizzio to bed instead of her. She responds, a day or two later, by thumping his chest so hard that he angrily Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.For various reasons, obviously co-incident with the death of the British Empire, she has felt a special attachment to the Commonwealth,which (with the recent return of Gambia) includes some 53 countries, some rather surprisingly with no particular history with Britain. Queen Elizabeth pledged her life to the service of the Commonwealth, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shall we dodge? (One, two, three) No, the brilliance of Bartlett Sher’s Tony-winning Lincoln Center revival – first on Broadway in 2015, now gracing the West End, with its original leads – is that it faces the problematic elements of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical head on. But, in a canny reading, it finds such nuance in the piece that it feels freshly minted – if gorgeously attired in Golden Age trappings.Based on the memoirs of army widow Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara), the show follows her journey to Siam in 1862, where she’s employed to teach the many children (by many wives) Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A rope is mercy; a razor-blade to the throat, a kiss; a red-hot poker… But, of course, we never get anything so literal as the poker in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s elegant, insinuating retelling of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. The title may separate its two concepts – Lessons in Love and Violence – but what we’re really unpicking here (what we’re always unpicking with these two authors) is the fleshy tangle of the two, the stubbornly indivisible, Roger McGough-style loveandviolence.This is an opera built on the sliding panels of elision, metaphor and metonymy – a shifting world Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
QCC isn’t the name of a new football club, nor some higher qualification for those toiling at the Bar, but stands for "Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy". Had you heard of it? On the eve of the Commonwealth conference, along came Jane Treays's gently hilarious, and finally rather tender film to fill in the gaps. Its central focus was on the nation’s favourite nonagenarians, the Queen herself and Sir David Attenborough, pottering about and chatting in a garden – that quintessential English idyll – and not just any old garden, but that of Buckingham Palace. Quietly, they talk about saving the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Titian! Mantegna! Rubens! Dürer! Veronese! Van Dyck! Raphael! Velazquez! About 140 works which were once part of Charles I’s 2,000-strong collection are reunited in a sumptuous collaboration between the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection. It is a marvellous selection covering the 15th to the 17th centuries, the Northern and Southern Renaissance and the baroque. Charles I may have been a wretched king and politician, but he was an outstanding and original connoisseur collector and commissioner of art. Among the greatest hits exhibitions, there are even surprises: take Rembrandt' Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s fascinating to compare this Norwegian film, which despite being Oscar-nominated (it made the Best Foreign Film shortlist of nine, but not the final five) has slipped out without a cinema release in the UK, with Darkest Hour. Set over a crucial few days in April 1940, it’s a parallel story of powerful personalities and their personal and political dilemmas in the face of Germany’s invasion of Europe. But the parallels don’t extend to directorial style; where Joe Wright opted for overly artful set pieces and CGI flourishes in Darkest Hour, for The King’s Choice Erik Poppe adheres to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Henry VIII had a troubled marital history and Charles I lost his head, but both have also gone down in history as original, innovative and obsessive collectors of art, founders in different ways of what is now one of the world’s greatest accumulations in all media. The tale of this particular royal occupation is being brought up to date in four weekly episodes led by the enthusiastic Andrew Graham-Dixon, our go-to serial art presenter. Episode one was subtitled Dangerous Magic. And in this iteration, Graham-Dixon’s own script is loaded down with exclamatory clichés. What is it about even long Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench Read more ...