Bellini's most consistently inspired opera, director Orpha Phelan tells us, has been set on a pedestal. Well, a pedestal would have been good for the titular Druid high priestess to deliver her celebrated invocation, a moon, perhaps some trees for the sacred wood, a chorus standing still in a semicircle. Traditional? Yes, but so is the shallow window-dressing for a rather interesting love-triangle. Though there's a splendid bellicose chorus, taken at a terrific lick here, Phelan goes in hard on the war aspect by setting the whole thing in a ruined church, post-apocalypse (she writes), with Read more ...

Talking about the demographic of audiences can put one on tricky ground. I once, for example, got into trouble for pointing out that Autechre’s crowd was 80-plus per cent middle aged white men. But really, the audience makes a show in so many ways, and that is especially the case when it comes to Mitsuki Laycock aka Mitski. Going into the Albert Hall, it was impossible to ignore the fact that it was packed overwhelmingly with girls and young women of various distinctly outsider-ish demeanours. From deliberately low-key baggy and tousled get-up through to extreme cosplay in East Asian styles ( Read more ...

Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape had its world premiere in 1958, with Patrick Magee, at the Royal Court. That same venue happens to be the site of Gary Oldman's last stage appearance in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money in 1987 – which I saw back in the day. So it's a genuine occasion to welcome both the play and its current performer back to this address as part of a heavy-hitting lineup of work across the year to celebrate the Court's 70th year. Devotees of this past and present powerhouse of a venue will surely recall Harold Pinter nearly 20 years ago delivering a now-canonical monologue in Read more ...

Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.Suddenly Kylie was a pop phenomenon, banging out chartbusters as easily as some people Read more ...

Art should reflect its times, but after a preview week dominated by the controversial participation of Russia and Israel, the 61st Venice Biennale felt in pressing need of distraction and delight. Instead, across 99 national pavilions and 31 “collateral” events, the mood is end of days, from the Bulgarian pavilion’s dispatches from the near future, to Florentina Holzinger’s sewage and nudity extravaganza in the Austrian pavilion. A gloomy title, In Minor Keys, set the tone in advance, and the main exhibition, tasked with setting the Biennale agenda, follows suit: overstocked with the Read more ...

"Being asked to introduce this artist”, began the compere, “is like being asked to introduce God." Fans of Eric Clapton, of course, might beg to differ. But in jazz terms, Sonny Rollins, self-proclaimed “saxophone colossus”, has indisputably been on the all-time A-list since his early work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. He is also on a particularly exclusive part of that list of jazz greats: those still alive. Yet even amongst those few, whose resilient ranks include both Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, Rollins’s London Jazz Festival performance represented a quite remarkable Read more ...

We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...

Benvenuti a Napoli cries the huge corny poster of the blue bay and ominous Vesuvius that looms over Neil Irish’s sets for Così fan tutte. However, we’re no longer in the Enlightenment city of cynical male experiments in female psychology where Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1790 first took place. Now, in the 1950s stage of post-1945 America’s forever wars, Naples-posted US Marines Guglielmo and Ferrando meet up with long-distance sweethearts Fiordiligi and Dorabella after a transatlantic flight. Elizabeth Karani’s multi-tasking Despina serves as runway signaller as the arriving passengers Read more ...

With impeccable timing, the Orange Tree in Richmond has scheduled a one-act play that’s exactly what a beleaguered public needs: 75 minutes of mind-bendingly ludicrous physical comedy in the form of Peter Shaffer’s 1965 hit, Black Comedy. It's still a lethal weapon.Farce was a theatrical staple at that time, regularly broadcast on primetime television from the Whitehall Theatre. A pants-down Brian Rix in flamboyant underwear invaded the nation’s living rooms long before serious dramas with suggestive sex scenes were allowed in. So Shaffer was working fertile soil. (Spoiler alert if you have Read more ...

Steve Martin famously said that writing about music was like trying to dance architecture, so maybe making a movie about painting is like – I don’t know – trying to chant ceramics. But this Britain-New Zealand co-production has a go at following in the footsteps of films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), both of which got us more than half-interested in the deeply mundane and scarily intense business of daubing paint.It tells of the very extended process by which supermodel Kate Moss was limned by postwar portraiture colossus Lucian Freud in 2001. So Read more ...

Kahchun Wong ended his second season as the Hallé’s principal conductor with a blockbuster – and one from what may be seen as his personal zone of expertise: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.Blockbuster in the sense that it’s a huge undertaking logistically, with a very large orchestra required, and that it’s a very big work. Blockbuster also almost literally – the finale requires an enormous Thor-like hammer to be wielded, at least twice, to create a thud akin to that of an axe at the base of a tree.Should it be three thumps, or just two? Mahler changed his mind about that, and editors and Read more ...

The psychological masterstroke of this quietly devastating work is to portray it from the point of view of an elderly woman who is convinced that she should not be in an old people’s home. Like the vast majority of us, Joan – played with spiky elegance by Linda Bassett – cannot see why she should relinquish her independence to be surrounded by people who seem, in different ways, to be losing their minds. On Rosana Vize’s rigorously naturalistic set – with its formulaic framed paintings and armchairs set in a forlorn semi-circle – we watch Joan’s initial encounters with the home’s Read more ...