France
Adam Sweeting
In a hectic writing career spanning theatre, radio, film and TV, Sarah Phelps can lay claim to such milestone moments of popular culture as both the return of Den Watts to EastEnders and his subsequent demise in 2005, and writing the screenplay for BBC One's adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations at Christmas 2011, which starred Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson. Her work for the stage includes Angela Carter at the Bridewell Theatre (an adaptation of a brace of Carter's stories) and Tube at Manchester Royal Exchange (which won her an Arts Council Award), while her armful of TV credits Read more ...
David Nice
Where did all the terrific programming energy of last year’s The Rest is Noise festival go? One answer – surprising given the orchestra’s former Friday night lite status – is into a two-concert adventure by the BBCCO. World to Come, World Once Known has been devised by Principal Conductor Keith Lockhart to reflect the Janus-headed phenomenon of music just before, during and after the First World War.While the first concert, to be broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 3, registered the shock of the new following the cataclysm, last night’s poignant sextet of works examined grief – for lost Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Were it not for the bombs which rained down on Calais, its current Musée des Beaux-Arts would not exist. The 1966 building was part of a civic reconstruction programme, so it too is a war memorial of sorts. And it's now playing host to an exhibition dedicated to the idea of the monument which looks to commemorate the two world wars.Not only is it 100 years since the outbreak of World War One, but it's 70 since the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy. Seeming not to be content with present-day conflicts, like Syria, and potential conflicts, like the Ukraine, the media and to some degree Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Thérèse Raquin is not a happy sort of production. This musical adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel transports you to the dank darkness of the Passage du Pont Neuf in 19th century Paris, and reveals the inner workings of a secretly miserable family. There are no jazz bands or catchy melodies here.The title character is a young woman, anaesthetised into silent numbness by the repetitive banality of her life in the family's tiny haberdasher's shop. Taken in by her aunt as a child when her Algerian mother died, Thérèse was then married off to her first cousin, her aunt's sickly son Camille, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As she proved in her exquisite debut Love Like Poison, French director Katell Quillévéré has an astonishing knack for delicately told stories which, in their sensitivity to character and credibility, pack a weighty emotional punch. And so it goes in her follow-up Suzanne, an aesthetically sunny story of unconditional familial love and the grand, gut-wrenching folly that comes from being romantically entangled with a dubious character.It's a tale that's likely to be quickly taken into your affections, for it’s one that delights in childhood. We first meet Suzanne Merevsky as a little girl ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's going to be a long slog through the mud and blood of the Great War commemorations, but we're going to learn a lot along the way. Coming up next month on BBC One is The Crimson Field, a new drama about nurses on the Western Front in 1915. Specifically, the action takes place in the fictional Hospital 25A near Étaples, where battlefield casualties find themselves being tended by a mixture of stalwart career nurses and the inexperienced young woman of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD).Boasting a 24-carat cast which includes Suranne Jones, Hermione Norris, Oona Chaplin (pictured below), Read more ...
David Nice
Jean-Philippe Rameau, the most radical and inventive of French composers before Berlioz, died in Paris 250 years ago this September. 16 years later a gem among theatres opened its doors for the first time with a long evening’s entertainment including Racine’s Athalie, supported by an incidental score from the resident music master Franz Beck.There I caught in full, startling production flight not the Rameau opera which most often turned up in the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux's early repertoire, Castor et Pollux, but what was originally called a "ballet heroïque", Les Indes galantes. You can hear Read more ...
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout in Claire Mathon’s widescreen cinematography, are deceptive: this gay cruising area is a place of urgent, largely silent action, and deadly undercurrents, where sexual fascination can become potentially fatal.The film opens with the arrival of the goodlooking Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who parks his car, strips down, and goes into the water. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy, playing in Berlinale’s Forum programme, recycles that legend, only in his film Houellebecq is vanished to a gypsy compound outside Paris where he’s held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Nothing then of the atmosphere of Houellebecq’s most recent Goncourt Prize- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of three Royal Festival Hall concerts during the first half of 2014 from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Charles Dutoit, all three programmes consisting entirely of French music. The other two will be in May. In between the Swiss-born conductor, a sprightly 77-year-old, will have picked up a Lifetime Achievement gong at the International Classical Music Awards in Warsaw.The relationship between the RPO and Dutoit seems to work well, not least because the repertoire he is working with them on is abolutely his home territory. These were the works Read more ...
stephen.walsh
As before, WNO have a theme for their new opera season: this time it’s Fallen Women, a topic that might well attract the attention of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Surely men have the right to fall as well; we await, in June, The Fall of the House of Usher, a much fairer piece than Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, which opened the company’s winter season in a new production by the Polish director Mariusz Treliński. In Debussy’s Usher brother and sister both fall, and the house falls on top of them.Treliński is in any case much taken with the theme. Not only is his Manon (Chiara Taigi) already Read more ...