mythology
Ragnarok, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh review - moving miniature apocalypseTuesday, 13 February 2024In terms of conveying monumental events using small-scale means, Edinburgh’s Tortoise in a Nutshell visual theatre company has form. Their 2013 Feral, for example, depicted the social breakdown of an apparently idyllic seaside town using puppetry... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Werner Herzog - Radical DreamerTuesday, 13 February 2024Weird, quirky Hollywood Werner can obscure the fierce visionary who warred with Kinski in the jungle. This is even true of many of his own features since moving to LA which, like his peer Wenders, usually pale next to his reverent, supernal... Read more... |
Elektra, Royal Opera review - moral: don’t wait too long for revengeSaturday, 13 January 2024Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge... Read more... |
Daphne, Scottish Opera, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - Strauss’s translucent hymn to natureMonday, 11 December 2023On an Edinburgh afternoon of torrential rain close to the winter solstice, what ecstasy to be transported to an ancient Greek midsummer day, a Claude landscape with shepherds calling across the hills, painted in the most translucent colours by... Read more... |
The Mongol Khan, London Coliseum review - unique operatic spectacle utterly overwhelms flaws in pacing and storyWednesday, 22 November 2023“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but... Read more... |
Mami Wata review – a gorgeous, strange African fableSunday, 19 November 2023Mami Wata is the female West African water god still worshipped in Iyi, a fragile, matriarchal village redoubt against modernity. Writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third film makes Iyi a battleground for African identity, in a glistening black-... Read more... |
The Ossianic Ballads, Edinburgh Quartet, Màiri MacMillan, National Library of Scotland review - good ingredients get lost in the mixMonday, 25 September 2023To coincide with the National Library of Scotland’s first bi-lingual exhibition Sguel/Story, an exhibition in English and Scottish Gaelic which celebrates stories and storytelling, the library presented a performance of newly reinterpreted Gaelic... Read more... |
Album: Rachel Sermanni - Dreamer AwakeTuesday, 19 September 2023It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Royal Opera - knotty, riveting route to destructionFriday, 15 September 2023Let’s set aside, to begin with, the question of the concept, other than to praise it as consistent. Most vital about this brave new Rheingold is the vindication of director Barrie Kosky’s claim that “what makes a Ring production interesting is the... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Stuntman / Beautiful Evil Things / What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed...Tuesday, 08 August 2023Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★Masculinity and violence are hot subjects for theatrical examination – and dance theatre two-hander Stuntman from Scottish company Superfan is far from the only Fringe show that investigates them this year. What... Read more... |
Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibilityFriday, 19 May 2023Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds.So it has been with Mars, conspicuous to us Earthbound gazers as one... Read more... |
The Rhinegold, English National Opera review - tacky, edgy, brilliantMonday, 20 February 2023All that glitters, titular treasure included, is dangerous childsplay in Richard Jones’s third UK staging of what Wagner called the “preliminary evening” to the three main operas of The Ring of the Nibelung. It’s nothing like the previous two, for... Read more... |
- 1 of 12
- ››