19th century
David Nice
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess. You’ve got to admire the ambitious scope of it, but inspiration is Read more ...
David Nice
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a 19th-century Swedish estate to a contemporary farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm is so painstakingly evocative that all worries about the latest publicity image – shades of blaxploitation, more Mandingo than Miss Julie – instantly evaporate.There’s much of the same giddying power-shifts and sexual violence that buffet the original, but Farber’s recent conception, fresh from acclaim at last year's Edinburgh Festival, recalibrates the context dramatically. The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Scores of reddish-bronze skinned men, and a few women and children, in full regalia, festooned in face paint, feathers, jewellery and decorations of all kind. They stare out at us, impassive and imperturbable, immortalised by George Catlin (1796-1872), the most famous American artist you have never heard of. His work is embedded in the American consciousness, if not its conscience. This succinct and representative selection visits London 170 years after the sensational exhibition of his Indian Gallery in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1843, when 500 of his portraits of American Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stage himself. Redolent with the smell of “gas and oranges”, Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawny of The Wells is not just any play, but a play about the business of theatre-making - a sentimental romance between life and art that hides its simpering blushes behind a veil of farcical comedy. It’s meta-theatre, Victorian-style, but can so period a piece really bear the weight of Wright’s high-concept passion for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Since I last reviewed Opera’r Ddraig (no longer offered as Dragon Opera in their publicity) two years ago, this company of students and postgraduates has moved house, and this year is staging its main show, Offenbach’s delightfully absurd Orpheus spoof, in the cavernous old Coal Exchange down by Cardiff Bay.It isn’t a happy move, and I hope won’t be permanent. The Exchange is a high, flat hall with, of course, no orchestra pit, and the show’s director, Imogen Tedbury, has put up a steeply terraced stage which makes for excellent sight-lines but badly inhibits stage movement, entrances and Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The “Mastersingers of Manchester”, about 350 of them, were gathered together by Sir Mark Elder to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary with this performance of Act Three of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in its entirety. He also pulled in about 200 orchestral musicians, exploiting the city’s resources just about to the limit.Sir Mark even broke into song himself in the build-up to the main event. With the help of his assistant conductor Jamie Phillips and soloists and young musicians, some only 12 years old, from the Hallé Youth Orchestra and Chetham’s School of Music, Elder set the scene with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We’ve seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get the full theatrical treatment, and I’m not sure any have ended up the better for it. The power of a tale is in the telling, and unmoored from the delicate narrative handling of an Austen or a Dickens things can go horribly awry. And so it is with the West End’s latest – a touring production of Dickens’ Great Expectations that has stumbled mistakenly onto The Strand and is doing its best to brazen it out.Jo Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pre-Raphaelites, eat your heart out; and wherever he is, John Ruskin, once so dismissive of the artist, must be beaming with pleasure. The American landscape painter Frederic Church (1826-1900) was indeed seen as the heir to Turner, and his distinct landscape idiom is encapsulated by a handful of oil sketches – just over two dozen – of scenes from the Hudson River Valley to Petra, Ecuador to Newfoundland, Bavaria to Salzburg, Jamaica to Labrador. It is enough to give a tantalising glimpse of his extraordinary fluency with colour, texture and composition, at the service of a passionate Read more ...
David Nice
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent Garden’s new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and allows him to inflect every move his characters make with the right emotion.His basic premise begins at the end: with the older, more dislocated Onegin and Tatyana aching their way back to that time in a mid-19th century adolescence when happiness was so close. That makes it clear at the start that Read more ...
David Nice
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut. It has the potential to be a glorious creation, one Read more ...