tragedy
The Jungle, Playhouse Theatre review - new territorySaturday, 07 July 2018
"I am dead," declares Okot before recounting the horrors he survived to reach Calais. Each time, he says, "I died." How many times can you die before you are truly dead? What is it that finally kills you? These are the questions at the heart of... Read more... |
Translations, National Theatre review - an Irish classic returns with cascading forceThursday, 31 May 2018
What sort of physical upgrade can a play withstand? That question will have occurred to devotees of Brian Friel's Translations, a play that has thrived in smaller venues (London's Hampstead and Donmar, over time) and had trouble in larger spaces: a... Read more... |
King Lear, BBC Two review - modernised TV adaptation is a mixed blessingTuesday, 29 May 2018
Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too. Richard Eyre‘s new version for the BBC sets Shakespeare’s most remorselessly bleak tragedy in a pseudo-modern Britain where historic stately homes co-exist with... Read more... |
Antony and Cleopatra, RSC, Barbican review - rising grandeurWednesday, 13 December 2017
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of... Read more... |
Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, Royal Opera review - one tenor, two samey brutesMonday, 04 December 2017
Are "Cav and Pag" inseparable? Clearly not, to judge from Opera North's "Little Greats" and elsewhere, but it's still the pairing of choice. Tricky, because as music-theatre, Leoncavallo's drama of rough life entwined with rough art stands high... Read more... |
Prom 72 review: Vienna Philharmonic, Harding - uncertain Mahler Six partly redeemed by brassFriday, 08 September 2017
Outlines of a real face had begun to emerge in Daniel Harding’s conducting personality. His youthful rise to the top initially yielded neutral concerts with the LSO and a glassy, overpraised recording of Mahler’s Tenth in the Deryck Cooke completion... Read more... |
King Lear, Shakespeare's Globe - Nancy Meckler's Globe debut is unusually subduedThursday, 17 August 2017
Every play is a Brexit play. This much we have learnt in the year since the referendum. But in Nancy Meckler’s hands the Globe’s new King Lear becomes the Brexit play – an unpicking of intergenerational responsibility and difference, of philosophies... Read more... |
Hamlet, Harold Pinter Theatre review - dislocatingly fresh makeoverSaturday, 17 June 2017
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to... Read more... |
Hamlet, Glyndebourne review - integrity if not genius in Brett Dean's scoreMonday, 12 June 2017
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of... Read more... |
Medea, Bristol Old Vic - formulaic feminism lets Greek classic downFriday, 12 May 2017
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: LudwigThursday, 06 April 2017
No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open... Read more... |
Madama Butterfly, Royal OperaFriday, 31 March 2017
"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her. Heartbreak is what we expected from Ermonela Jaho after her... Read more... |
