17th century
Sarah Kent
The title of Joy Gregory’s Whitechapel exhibition is inspired by a proverb her mother used to quote – “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and her aim is to seduce rather than harangue the viewer.
It’s a good stratagem, especially if you are pointing to things your audience may prefer not to consider. And Gregory’s images can be beautiful (the seduction); but in order to avoid a diatribe, she often approaches her subject obliquely and quietens her voice to a whisper, requiring the viewer to pay close attention and hone in on the message.
If most photographers use the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel.
We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This week Vladimir Putin tried to murder my hosts in Ukraine. He failed. In more hopeful days, I spoke at a seminar organised by the British Council’s branch in Kyiv. Its offices (along with the EU delegation) felt the force of a Russian missile strike on Wednesday night. No one died there, thankfully, although 23 more civilians in the city perished. As President Trump manoeuvres for a “deal” that would hand Putin most of his ill-gotten territorial gains on a silver platter, it was a bloody reminder that the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra – launched as musical ambassadors for their Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Buxton International Festival this year was lavish in its smaller-scale productions in addition to Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the heavyweight offer of the opera programme. And outstanding among them was the combination of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine: seen by director Daisy Evans not just as a double bill with an overlapping need for telephones on set, but as two sides of the same story.She took Bernstein’s picture of an American middle-aged couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and Poulenc’s of a woman on the verge of committing suicide after her lover Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli.The first, spellbinding adventure, a Dante triptych, I discovered in its second year, a reinvention of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A suitable place to find yourself out for the winter solstice, buttoning up for the longest night of the year, was at the Cadogan Hall off Sloane Square, a former place of worship marking its 20th year as a concert hall.The Unthanks, too, are approaching their 20th anniversary, and their winter tour of 2024 draws from their magical new album, In Winter, a double set that has drawn comparison to that ultimate winter album in British folk music – The Waterson’s Frost & Fire.For their celebration of the season, and of its spirits, they draw on big songs such as The Coventry Carol and The Read more ...
Justine Elias
From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.British filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, who admits a childhood fascination with TV's “good witches”, like Bewitched's Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery), recently found a deeper, more disturbing kinship with such figures. After the birth of her son, now three years old, Sankey suffered depression so severe that she spent months in a mother-baby Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As he might slide off it in transit, for good measure he gives it a belt to tie him down. It would be a “seat belt”, he suggests triumphantly.This detail tells you a lot about the world the American playwright Rajiv Joseph has created in Guards at the Taj (2015). It’s a fantasy, semi-surreal, with one foot planted in the quotidian. The terrain is from a distant era that verges on mythology, a time of autocratic emperors with grand projects, though its two Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as a true story.Quite the opposite, in fact. Timestalker is totally – and delightfully – bonkers right from its first scene, set in 1688 against a backdrop of the Scottish Covenanter uprising, where Agnes, a dowdy spinster (played by Lowe herself and introduced, literally, at a spinning wheel) falls headlong in love at a public execution, again quite Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a question that Ellen McWilliams, in her highly moving and humorous memoir, takes not only seriously but as the stylistic basis of her work. An early rhetorical question she asks haunts the text: ‘who am I to speak?’ The consequences of asking this are twofold and, I think, important. It conjures the anxiety of forcing the tragic narratives owned by others to conform to the pattern of a separate subjective language. But it also carries with it the weight Read more ...