mythology
Jon Turney
Humans 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 of the heavenly bodies that wanders from place to place against the backdrop of the stars. A planet, then, whatever that might be. An occult influence on terrestrial affairs, perhaps, or the sign of some unusually active god. Later, it seemed, a world that could share features with our own, as images of the known and unknown were both refashioned Read more ...
David Nice
All 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 the Royal and Scottish Operas, in some ways disconcertingly minimal and occasionally ugly to look at. Yet everything adds up and unlike the cast for his Valkyrie, this team has the perfect mix of vocal and acting gold.If there’s a snag, it comes early: Martyn Brabbins simply lets Wagner's music for the Rhine and its Daughters drift along without Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
At a time when every other theatre is offering an alternative Christmas show, what to make of the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with Lost Dog, aka director-choreographer Ben Duke, who has come up with the most un-merry topic imaginable? Meet Medea, the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who butchered her brother, nobbled her ex’s new bride and murdered her own children. The Wind in the Willows this is not.Remarkably, though, Ruination (what a downer of a title!) succeeds in navigating its tortuous path between violent deeds and lacerating regrets by way of verbal comedy as well as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-eight films and 19 proliferating TV series in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming wearisome, testing fans’ faith with grimly effortful new entries, and choking other sorts of film into the margins, like knotweed. But like the mid-20th century Western, superheroes are also a commercial template for anyone to tell any sort of story. When Taika Waititi’s dry satirist’s voice let rip on Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he combined all his and the genre’s wild virtues.And now, washing away the grim taste of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, here he goes again. With Odin dead and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Mert Dilek
At long last, the giant has come back. Over a decade after its critical apotheosis on both sides of the Atlantic, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem returns to London in an astonishing revival starring Mark Rylance as the high priest of its proceedings. With the renewed intensity of its vision of an England in crisis, Butterworth’s infinitely rich play is proof that legends age well. First staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2009, Ian Rickson’s superbly calibrated production once again lures us into a world marked by its anarchic flair and supernatural rhythm. At its centre is Johnny “Rooster Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Crazy? Aristocrat? Sad? Killer? Drunk?” A modern Tuscan hunting lodge’s regulars remember the myth of irascible rebel Luciano many ways, as it endures from the previous century’s misty turn. Italian-American co-directors Matteo Zoppi and Allessio Rigo de Righi’s feature debut follows documentary shorts drawn from those real hunters’ yarns, tipped now into the phantasmagoric territory of Werner Herzog, or Lucretia Martel’s Spanish colonial fever dream, Zama.We first see reflective stars sparking on Luciano’s silhouette in water, and his green eyes elsewhere seem connected to the cosmos. The Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirling audiences into Pullman’s universe of daemons, damnable clerics and parallel worlds. Now he has collaborated with playwright Bryony Lavery to bring this fluent, fluid adaptation of the prequel to His Dark Materials – The Book of Dust – to the stage, delving into Pullman’s myth-infused landscape to create a compelling narrative for our times.Samuel Creasey plays Malcolm Polstead, the bookish wide-eyed 12-year-old who becomes embroiled in forces beyond Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Ovid was exiled – or to put it in twenty-first century terms, "no-platformed" – by an indignant Emperor Augustus for the scandal caused by his three-book elegy on love, Ars Amatoria. Most scholars believe the intrigue behind his banishment to be more complex, but as this vibrant, dark and witty version of Metamorphoses demonstrates, his poetry continues to push at the edges of what society finds acceptable. Sean Holmes and Holly Race Roughan’s production has itself been forced through several changes because of the shapeshifting tricks of the pandemic (Covid's Metamorphoses?!). At one Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Philoctetes, Odysseus, Neoptolemus: the men’s names in Sophocles’ Philoctetes are all unnecessarily long and weighed down by expectations. Poet Kae Tempest’s lyrical new adaptation for the National Theatre focuses on the chorus, spinning out the original’s scope to examine the effects of conflict on women – and showing off all their Mercury-nominated wit and wordplay in the process.The subject matter located us at the end of the Trojan War, after Achilles’ death but before the horse comes into play. Philoctetes has been festering on an island for a decade, marooned there by Odysseus after an Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The Young Vic, led by the inspiring figure of Kwame Kwei-Armah, is back. After a prolonged closure, during which this venue has passionately continued to work with young directors, the local community (including both delivering food and creative engagement) and the Black Lives Matter movement, the main stage now reopens with Booker Prize winner Ben Okri’s short play, Changing Destiny, directed by Kwei-Armah. Based on a 4,000-year-old poem from ancient Egypt called Sinuhe, the story is one of political intrigue, fearful exile and then spiritual rebirth. At a time of increasing rhetoric and Read more ...