mythology
Thomas H. Green
Many groups have based their career focusing almost completely on one thing and evermore honing it. Bands ranging from The Ramones to the Cocteau Twins to the Black Keys to even the Foo Fighters could arguably be said to follow this remit. Swedish metallers Amon Amarth certainly do. Since 1992 they have been creating Viking-themed metal and for their eleventh album, they are not about to change things.Amon Amarth began at a time when Scandinavian death metal was mired in real darkness and controversy, but, although born of that scene, their sound blossomed into something much more crowd- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Stopped in the street for a vox pop by a BBC interviewer keen to “fill your air” with strife and bile, a character in Spring retorts that “there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit, yeah?” Newshound critics, take note. The symbolically named Brit (short, originally, for Brittany) works as a guard at a migrant detention centre. In its hellish corridors, people driven by suffering, abuse and terror out of regions much less favoured than navel-gazing Europe endure routine contempt and cruelty in a “kind of underworld”, a “place of the living dead”. As in the two preceding volumes of Ali Smith Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hel, heroine of Gavin Higgins and Francesca Simon’s new opera, is the illegitimate daughter of the Norse god Loki. In many ways The Monstrous Child itself feels like a bastard offspring, born – moody, mouthy and full of fragile rage – to Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Skins or possibly 13 Reasons Why.Hel has many more than 13 reasons for her anger. Rejected by her parents, tormented by the gods and banished to rule over the dead for all eternity, she’s determined to escape and find a way back to her crush Baldr – an aim complicated by the fact that she’s half-girl, half-corpse, dragging half a ton Read more ...
David Nice
Harpers on the undeniably offensive aspect of Wagner the man might question attending a concert performance of his second Ring opera on World Holocaust Day. Fortunately there's nothing anti-semitic to be found anywhere in Die Walküre. As embodied by the cruel and tender score, the poet-composer's transformation of barbaric Northern mythology into the most essential of themes for our or any time - the power of love versus the love of power (not my coinage, but says it all) - is pure compassionate genius. It's crystallised in an interpretation as phenomenal as that of Vladimir Jurowski - too Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Eddie Redmayne reprises his role as the bashful but brilliant Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (pictured below), joined by muggle-baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and witches Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol). Leaving New York, the quartet from the first film travel to a jazz-age Paris on the hunt for the troubled Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The road to full musical theatre production has been a long one for Hadestown. It began back in 2006, with Anaïs Mitchell’s song cycle – a folk/jazz take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth – toured around Vermont in a school bus, then grew into an ecstatically received concept album in 2010, and has gone through further development with director Rachel Chavkin in Off-Broadway and Canadian stagings. Now, it comes to the National ahead of a Broadway run.Whatever its past or future forms, Chavkin’s staging is a superb fit for the Olivier. Rachel Hauck’s spare, multi-level speakeasy set, which Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it ends. Flames give way to water, and as the Rhinemaidens resume their naked dance we come full circle – quite literally in Keith Warner’s Wagner Ring – back where we began, on the banks of the Rhine. Once again we find ourselves on the brink – but of what? A young woman framed in the giant ring that descends in the music’s final moments suggests a hopeful new beginning, a new generation of heroes. But with the old gods burnt up in the fire, who or what will take their place?Third time round, and still things remain – for good or ill – ambiguous in Warner’s staging. Admittedly in Read more ...
David Nice
Siegfried is usually the problem with Siegfried. Even Stuart Skelton, top Tristan and currently singing an acclaimed Siegmund in this last revival of Keith Warner's rattlebag Ring, won't touch the longest, toughest heroic-tenor role in Wagner, the protagonist of his third opera in the tetralogy. Stefan Vinke, singing his 100th Siegfried during this Royal Opera run, is a true hero, still sounding as fresh as - well, not exactly a daisy, more like a magnolia grandiflora. His stamina gave us not only the most thrilling of climaxes to Act One, where the fearless lad reforges his father's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perched alone and fearful in her hut as the curtain rises on Die Walküre, Sieglinde clutches and then throws aside a grimy teddy-bear. Story time is over. The nymphs and gold and bickering gods all belong in the past, to the ‘preliminary evening’ of Das Rheingold, or so Sieglinde might think. The real drama of Wagner's Ring begins here. It’s a nice metaphor, one of many that Keith Warner throws into the pot for his Royal Opera staging on its final appearance.Other false comforts and dreams of dominion bind the Victorian age of the Ring’s composition to subsequent eras of industrialised Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas, continuing into November. The designs (by Stefanos Lazaridis) and dramaturgy have mostly aged well, aided by Warner’s high-drama but low-concept approach. The casting for this Rheingold is less starry than before, but makes for a good ensemble – which is exactly what Das Rheingold requires.For the opening scene, the depths of the Rhine are Read more ...
David Nice
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan. Instead, Wilton's Music Hall and Jamie Manton's sometimes hazy office-clutter production between them defuse the wild-woods magic as well as much of the fun and sharpness of this often miraculous collaboration with W H Auden, furnishing the best libretto Britten Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s an event that only comes around once a generation: a new Matt Groening TV series. The Simpsons is rightly regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. It changed the face of American television, and 10 years later was followed Futurama, a series that may lack the cross-demographic appeal of its predecessor, but consistently produced satirical masterpieces. Now, with a vastly changed viewing landscape, Groening makes the jump to streaming giants Netflix with his new show Disenchantment. The question is, can lightning strike thrice?On first appearances, probably not. Disenchantment is Read more ...