Greece
Boyd Tonkin
Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of generals. This week I was able to see, and hear, exactly what that means. A few days ago, in Scotland, I marvelled at flautist Adam Walker’s agility and versatility in his outstanding performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Lammermuir Festival. Yesterday, on the penultimate night of the Proms, there he was again with the Sinfonia, a stand-out soloist in key passages from Strauss’s tone-poem Don Juan and, above all, in the complete version, Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted.Her second feature Attenberg (2010), about a 23-year-old virgin who doesn't want sex or like people, was an accentric marvel. Shortly afterward, Tsangari co-produced her friend Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps. Whereas Lanthimos has since made himself comfortable in Hollywood, Tsangari has taken a different route. She recently travelled to the Inner Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The English title of a new film about the legendary singer-guitarist Stelios Kazantzidis, who popularised rebetiko, which is often called “the Greek blues”, may beguile some cinemagoers into thinking they are about to watch a biopic of the Cypriot entrepreneur, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of EasyJet. Luckily, Stelios is much more interesting than that.In Greece, where it has already smashed box-office records, the movie is entitled Iparho (“I Exist”) after a much-loved song by Kazantzidis, who is generally thought to be the Hellenic Republic’s answer to Frank Sinatra.Rather like Read more ...
Leila Greening
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.In the wake of her father’s death, a woman returns to the small Greek town where she mourned her mother nine years earlier. The narratives of her two trips are interwoven, as the events of the second provoke reflections Read more ...
James Saynor
The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through Europe, prick consciences and sweat palms in equal measure, but those two fine examples from last year were made by European directors on helicopter missions, as it were, to raise consciousness and to mine fresh seams of character.To a Land Unknown is a story of Palestinian refugees actually made by a Palestinian, Mahdi Fleifel, and it’s an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
We live in tragic times given over to cataclysmic events that require outsized emotions in return. That may be one reason to account for the uptick, therefore, in Greek drama, which includes not one but two Oedipi, various adaptations of Antigone, and the arrival on the commercial West End of the obvious companion piece to Oedipus, namely Elektra – the K in the title perhaps nodding to a landscape in which people exist to kill. The star attraction is Oscar winner Brie Larson, who certainly deserves credit for taking on this part in the harsh glare of the commercial theatre, not least in Read more ...
David Nice
The ancient Greeks would probably have liked a lot about Charlie Covell‘s manipulation of mythic material. After all, Euripides was prepared to have a laugh about the notion of Helen whisked off to Egypt while a phantom version wrought havoc in Troy. Helen doesn’t figure in this mostly modern-dress gods-vs-humans drama, but so many other legendary figures do, as well as several you probably won’t have heard of.There’s some focus, but only up to a point, and the diverse playlist of music tracks isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The mythic rule of three gives us a tacky, supersaturated Olympus Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Immersive opera such as this can be tricky to pull off, but the magic of Roxana Haines’s new production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex lies in its simplicity, letting the material organically weave around the audience without overcomplications or deliberately clever trickery.The National Museum of Scotland proved itself to be a fine venue for this performance in many ways. Its vast expanse of space allowed for much milling around the orchestra, which was in the centre, and the first floor balcony provided an elevated platform for those who’d prefer a birds’ eye view and not to be right in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Two women were best friends at school but they haven’t seen each other in years. One is an uptight divorcée, the other a free spirit. They have nothing in common any more but go on holiday to Greece together. A recipe for disaster, or what?Laure Calamy, Olivia Côte (pictured below) and Kristin Scott Thomas star in Call My Agent’s writer-director Marc Fitoussi’s sentimental, not very funny French comedy. The ageless Calamy is full of zest as the irrepressible, intensely irritating Magalie, while Côte, as sensible Blandine, is an effective enough counterfoil – and she does have a refreshingly Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Who is Sappho? What is she? Not much is known about the influential Greek poet who was born some 2500 years ago. Her poetry was celebrated during her lifetime, but very little has survived. Those fragments that do exist speak of love, passion and longing. Her name lives on, not just because of her poetry, but because both she and Lesbos, the island she lived on, have given their name to the love of one woman for another. And so Wendy Beckett’s glitzy, short comedy celebrates the life of the poet through the prism of gay love today.Although most of the cast are dressed in Greek tunics of the Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.Grigoris Karantinakis’s 2021 costume drama, originally released in Greece as Smyrna My Beloved, seems to be aware of uncomfortable historical parallels. It begins in 2015, Titanic-like, with a nonagenarian survivor rescuing something from the deep. In this case, Filio Williams (Jane Lapotaire), whose grandmother fled to Read more ...
David Nice
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and greeted with joyful groans. To say it’s no epic is a compliment: Charles Court Opera’s boutique pantos rely upon perfect focus in small spaces, and this is a tight little craft, with five brilliant women firing up director/writer John Savournin’s script and David Eaton’s musical arrangements.The gods aren’t happy with stagnation in Ithaca and Odysseus so far from home. The delivery service from Tamoy Phipps’ easily dispirited Hermes/Mercury has a Read more ...