Victorian
Mark Sheerin
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was criminally insane, and despite a disarming interest in fairies, his life and work cannot be spun into a happy-ever-after narrative.It's the fairies not the diagnosis that won him acclaim, inspiring his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64 (main picture) and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania,1854-58 (pictured below) are both Read more ...
Simon Munk
Should games be challenging? One of the perennial design challenges of videogames. Make a game too tough and you'll put people off; make it too easy and you'll offer no interest. And then there's the tricky issue of individuals having vastly different play styles and abilities.Bloodborne and its predecessors Dark Souls and Demon's Souls offer no sliding scale of player-set difficulty and, while you're at it, little in the way of mercy. I absolutely loathed the Souls games – for making me feel rubbish as a gamer, for making me die over and over, for offering no incentive, no easy way in, no Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recent attitudes to Victorian Britain have changed radically. The popular view used to be of a period filled with a kind of smug imperial confidence, underwritten by the increasing wealth of the industrial age. This ingrained assumption was perhaps epitomised by Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, which saw the eminences as bungling hypocrites. And although secret lives might have been as wild as may be, one characteristic myth was that even piano legs had to be obscured with frilly covers for decency. This simplistic summary was leavened by acknowledging geniuses from Read more ...
Simon Munk
The gloom of Victorian London might be shared with The Order: 1886, also reviewed this week, but the games couldn't be further apart. In Sunless Sea, you play a nautical captain, navigating the "Unterzee" of the waters surrounding a fallen, underground London. Or rather, you play lots of captains – because if this cruel game is about anything, it's about repeated death.Death comes from being eaten by a crew turned cannibal from a lack of supplies, from drowning after pirates hole your hull, or from your ship being swallowed whole by one of many foul monsters prowling the blacked-out waters. Read more ...
Simon Munk
In terms of atmosphere, The Order: 1886 wins out in spades. It's just everywhere else that it falls down, unfortunately.Sneaking through the Ripper-stalked streets of an alternative Victorian Whitechapel, you can almost smell the stink of the slums. And certainly this matches the recent Assassin's Creed: Unity for the detailed and fetid depiction of dirty, litter-strewn cobbled streets. It's moments like this that The Order does excellently.Another high point is when the zeppelin you're on board crashes into Crystal Palace (about 50 years early, but never mind), and you stagger out of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Whitworth Art Gallery was showered with meteors in a spectacle devised by the artist Cornelia Parker on its reopening weekend – appropriately Valentine’s Day. The £15m project (architects MUMA) has doubled the exhibition spaces, reclaimed the Victorian Grand Hall from offices, added state-of-the-art on-site storage and more space for conservators. Here is public art with sculpture and installations on the building itself, and in the surrounding park – landscape art not only in its park setting but within new gardens, and with the building providing wrap-around scenic views. There Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s villainous alter ego got a second airing tonight in his exploration of 19th-century Britain’s love of all things Gothic. Last week we saw him hanging about in decaying graveyards, or appearing, wraithlike in a dank corner of a Gothic ruin, while ravens circled portentously overhead (main picture). We saw him relating tales of horror and mystery in flickering candlelight, or peering through the flames of an infernal bonfire, and in tonight’s episode, always one for going the extra mile, he was touring Victorian sewers, with only a rat for company.The great thing about Read more ...
David Nice
“What does opera have to say to the under-30s?” asked Alexandra Coghlan on theartsdesk yesterday. The question “what does opera have to say to the under-10s?” has had to wait until today. For although yesterday afternoon’s performance of Will Todd’s newish opera for children of all ages was the last in its second, sell-out run on the Yucca Lawn behind Holland Park House, it seemed essential to make my four-year-old goddaughter Mirabel available for comment, and that was the only date available in her diary. The answer? Another wildly enthusiastic “plenty”, from her, mother, aunt and me. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last saw Dr Pamela Cox presenting BBC Two's Servants: the True Story of Life Below Stairs. Having done the academic's-eye-view of Upstairs Downstairs, she has now moved on to the world of Mr Selfridge in this three-part survey of the rise of the shopgirl from obscurity to comprehensive takeover.Dr Cox is an enthusiastic and refreshingly informal host, but even these helpful characteristics couldn't entirely banish the whiff of Open University hovering over this programme. There were groaning shelves of facts and statistics to plough through as she demonstrated with exhaustive thoroughness Read more ...
David Nice
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).This time, the naval high jinks allow Regan to evoke a kind of Privates on Parade scenario, the show-without-the-show set below deck on a World War Two battleship – or so we Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The past: it’s etched into the fabric not just of our lives, but of the architecture that surrounds us – the streets we tread, the buildings where we work or make our homes. In this whimsical, winning 90-minute piece by Will Adamsdale, the past has a niggling habit of leaping out from the places where it should lie buried, rubbing up cheekily against the present, and sticking its nose into the future.Sweet and slyly clever, the show blends the literary, the historic and the anecdotal to tell two London love stories, separated by over 100 years. Its ambitions are not, perhaps, vast. But with Read more ...
tanika.gupta
It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd, then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century. The picture of a group of Asian women sat around a table sewing and reading, wearing saris and Victorian dress Read more ...