sun 16/06/2024

Oxford

Mick Gordon on directing The Tempest

The central character in Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, is a betrayed Duke called Prospero. Prospero means omniscient panic: an apt name for an all-powerful creator of tempests and general wreaker of revenge. However, the profound appeal of...

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The Lion's Face, Opera Group

'A frighteningly convincing portrait': Dave Hill as Alzheimers sufferer Mr D, with Rachel Hynes

An opera about Alzheimer’s disease might seem an idea calculated to send the most community-minded audience rapidly to the nearest exit. Yet there's a longish history of theatre – musical and otherwise – about loss of memory and the failure of...

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Dave's Oscar moment

I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10...

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The Berlin Philharmonic European Concert 2010, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Berlin comes to Oxford: May Day at the Sheldonian with Barenboim and the Berliners

"Madness! Madness! Everywhere madness!" The unsung words of cobbler-philosopher Hans Sachs in the third-act prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger might seem like an odd opening manifesto for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's annual May Day...

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Posh, Royal Court Theatre

When artistic director Dominic Cooke took up his new post at this venue in 2007, he said that he wanted “to look at what it means to be middle class, what it means to have power, what it means to have wealth”. Although this comment caused a lot of...

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theartsdesk in Oxford: Food, Sex and Amis

“If I were a woman I would shag as many of you as had pubes and pricks that gave me sexual pleasure…” No less elderly than he is eminent, Professor Stanley Wells – editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and international authority on the Bard – smiles...

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Miroslav Balka, Tate Modern & Modern Art Oxford

Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the...

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