17th century
Tom Birchenough
Trimmings, trimmings. They prove the final straw for Molière’s Harpagon in this new adaptation of the classic French comedy-farce. The menu for his wedding banquet – which he doesn’t want to spend a centime more on than he has to – is being concocted by chef-cum-dogsbody, Jacques. Soup, yes; a bit of meat, possibly. But trimmings… The very thought of them provokes a howl of despair from Griff Rhys Jones, who plays The Miser’s titular tight-purse with enormous gusto.Sean Foley’s West End production definitely doesn't hold back on the trimmings, and they’re not just the standard stuffing on-the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in c.1640, David Teniers the Younger’s Boy Blowing Bubbles depicts a theme that would have been entirely familiar to his wife’s great-grandfather, the founder of one of art’s most illustrious dynasties, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Indicating the fleeting nature of life, the motif carries proverbial associations, its moral message one that in the 17th century was understood principally as memento mori. While Bruegel the Elder included depictions of proverbs in his panoramic scenes of peasant life, their meanings discussed and puzzled over by guests in the dining-rooms of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It's no accident that when the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opened in 2014 it was with The Duchess of Malfi. This wooden womb, with its thick darkness and close-pressed audience is made for the stifling, claustrophobic horror of revenge tragedy. Not since that original Malfi have we seen a production that has taken full advantage of the theatre, played with atmosphere to such horrible effect as Annie Ryan’s White Devil.Corrupt authority, sexual scandal, political intrigue: not a Trump White House, but Webster’s satire, dark as the ink in which it was written. This tale of the sexually Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…The Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Before we consign this miserable year to history, there are a few good bits to be salvaged; in fact, for the visual arts 2016 has been marked by renewal and regeneration, with a clutch of newish museum directors getting into their stride, and spectacular events like Lumiere London, and London’s Burning bringing light in dark times. 2016 leaves an impressive legacy of museum-building, too: Tate Modern opened its much needed extension in the summer, and the new Harley Gallery at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire provides a fittingly magnificent home for the treasures of the Portland Collection.The Read more ...
james.woodall
If you are new to the Donmar Warehouse all-female stagings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Henry IV – 2012 and 2014 respectively – the biggest surprise is not so much that these highly masculine dramas are performed entirely by women. It is their being set in a prison. With the long-planned trilogy now rounded off with The Tempest, which has premiered in the Donmar’s purpose-built 420-seater just north of King’s Cross, the device has attained lock-stock-and-barrel totality.The acting space is a square, with steeply raked seating on each side. Behind the last row runs prison caging, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Britain is a world by itself.” It could be the slogan of the year – and rather longer, probably – but the phrase comes from Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Its Act III scene, in which Britain announces that it is breaking its allegiances to the Roman Empire, surely can’t ever have played before with quite the nuance that Melly Still’s RSC production gives it. It premiered at Stratford in May, when the big Brexit question was still open, and now reaches the Barbican with redoubled relevance.Back in 1609, Britishness was the issue, too, but coming from the opposite direction: James Read more ...
james.woodall
Theatre was not Lucy Bailey’s first target. At school she was a flautist, headed probably for music. Then, in her gap year, she took a job as a telephonist at Glyndebourne, and noticed a vigorous man with a beard – name of Peter Hall – moving people around on stage. She asked what he was doing. Directing, she was told. That changed her.At Oxford, she staged the first-ever dramatisation of a short prose text titled "Lessness" by Samuel Beckett, whom she’d visited in Paris. In her early 20s she assisted Hall at the National Theatre, and directors such as Terry Hands and Adrian Noble at the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh, those dogs: just a flick of the brush, and there they are, bursting with life. Pets, hunting dogs, companions, strays: romping on beaches, or in Dutch forests, living on farms and in imagined arcadias. Adriaen van de Velde was a 17th century master of canine depiction. His frisky creatures were bit players in hunting scenes filled with horses, carriages, people and birds ready to be let loose, all set in the verdant Dutch landscape, or by the North Sea. So clever was van de Velde at depicting domestic animals that part of his practice was to insert them into paintings by other artists. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Lobgesang "lies very near my heart," wrote Mendelssohn. And the composer was so self-critical that the published order of his symphonies bears no resemblance to their composition: this "Hymn of Praise", known as the Second, was the penultimate before his symphonic masterpiece, the "Scottish". It is more often performed in recording studios, to satisfy recording companies’ hunger for complete cycles, than in concert, at least outside the composer’s native Germany.So a reappraisal is in order. Who better to lead it, in concerts and a forthcoming recording with the London Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Cheekily bottom-like, their downy skin blushing enticingly, these must be the sexiest apricots ever painted. If you held out your hand, you might just be able to touch them, there in the foreground of what is thought to be Caravaggio’s earliest surviving painting. Echoing the skin tones of a boy absorbed in the act of peeling fruit, the light highlights his hands and his downcast eyes make us voyeurs in a scene of unexpected sensuality. As setting the scene goes, it’s an excellent choice, and its somewhat tentative attribution is fitting for an exhibition dominated by the work not of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a riddle to which directors must find an answer. The problems posed by a work whose theatrical characters have no foothold in the musical interludes, whose text is an awkward composite of almost-Shakespeare and not-at-all-Shakespeare, whose unedited action can easily swell to a will-sapping four hours are not to be underestimated, but to address them by adding further narrative layers, further dramatic frames and meta-theatrical flummery is at best questionable and at worst wilful.Faced with the challenge of Purcell’s semi-opera, Daisy Evans empties her director’s Read more ...