16th century
Shakespeare triple bill, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 12 October 2016
Shakespeare has always been a fertile source of inspiration for story ballets. Plays which exist in multiple dance versions include Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, while Shakespeare... Read more... |
The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's GlobeSaturday, 04 June 2016
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an... Read more... |
King John, Rose Theatre, KingstonSaturday, 21 May 2016
According to Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, the true Bible of English history, King John was a Bad (to be exact, an Awful) King. Shakespeare had quite an interest in Bad Kings – Richards II and III were also subjected to his... Read more... |
Kings of War, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, BarbicanMonday, 25 April 2016
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years away from bad heritage Shakespeare. Doyen of Dutch-Belgian... Read more... |
James McNeill Whistler: Prints, The Fine Art SocietySunday, 17 April 2016
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).The FAS was founded in 1876, and is still... Read more... |
Opinion: Paintings with nothing to lose but their framesFriday, 18 March 2016
The dazzling, controversial, fascinating exhibition In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy inadvertently provides a striking example of an unavoidable and perhaps insoluble problem common to almost all exhibitions of painting – especially... Read more... |
In the Age of Giorgione, Royal AcademySaturday, 12 March 2016
Much is made of the mystery surrounding Giorgione, a painter of pivotal influence, about whom, paradoxically, we know almost nothing beyond the manner of his death. He died in a Venetian plague colony in 1510 aged about 33, and was as elusive in the... Read more... |
Bruegel in Black and White: Three Grisailles Reunited, Courtauld GalleryMonday, 08 February 2016
Now that Renaissance altarpieces live for the most part in museums and not churches, our experience of them is, quite literally, flat. Once, the winged altarpieces so popular in northern Europe, comprising a central panel flanked by two moveable “... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseFriday, 05 February 2016
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we... Read more... |
Elizabeth, Royal BalletSunday, 10 January 2016
Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so... Read more... |
La Dama d'Aragó, L'Arpeggiata, Wigmore HallTuesday, 22 December 2015
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP... Read more... |
A Wondrous Mystery, Stile Antico, Temple ChurchWednesday, 16 December 2015
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-... Read more... |
