19th century
David Nice
Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-card debut director, was right not to play by all of the composer’s already rather warped rules. At first you sigh: not the Nazis and the Holocaust again. But only an oddball visionary like Gilliam is going to come anywhere near the often disorienting musical pictures painted by the most original of Romantics.And the Romantic movement in which Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.Might they have planned it differently had they known? Wedding marches and arrivals of queens of Sheba would have drawn the Valleys coach parties; Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dan Snow's toxic trilogy climaxed in New York, where he crawled voyeuristically through the rotten core of the Big Apple. It was part Discovery Channel documentary, part Gangs of New York dirty realism, as Snow took a frankly indecent relish in regaling us with tales of death, disease and raw capitalism at its baby-eating worst.In the event, studying the development of America's greatest city from the bottom up, as it were, made perfect sense. In the mid-19th century, New York was a crude frontier settlement that occupied merely the southernmost tip of Manhattan island. Immigrants, for Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and which favours quiet pluck over showy heroics. With a narrative shorn almost entirely of incident, its existential, quasi-religious minimalism recalls Waiting for Godot.Set during the earliest days of the Oregon Trail in 1845 and based on real events, Meek’s Cutoff is the story of three families who, in their pursuit of a better life, hire a guide, Read more ...
fisun.guner
I prefer "living room", but I have a friend who insists on "lounge". For some reason that probably goes deep into the psyche, I cringe at "sitting room". Same goes for "front room". As for "reception room", I’ve only ever seen that in the windows of estate agents. "Parlour", too, is a rarity, confined now to TV period dramas, which is exactly where "drawing room" seems to be heading (or perhaps I’m not mixing in the right circles). And anyone who calls it a "dining room" should surely be consigned to lonely TV dinners in perpetuity.If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home, the first of a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. It’s an attractive legend, one that leans over the shoulders of Jane Eyre, of Cathy, Heathcliff and Helen Graham, reflecting their virgin-born passions back with all the greater intensity. Reversing this process, Polly Teale’s Brontë invites us instead to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable.Now here's Romola Garai taking aim at the enigmatic Sugar, the hooker with a keen intellect but possibly not a heart of gold from Michel Faber's novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. Faber's 800-odd pages have been boiled down into four parts by screenwriter Read more ...
fisun.guner
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot”. And as one might expect, the exhibition is beautifully designed, in a way that suggests you might have stumbled Read more ...
David Nice
I have no problem at all with updating Beethoven's early-19th-century paean to love and liberty: there are any number of tyrants and prisoners of conscience to whom its universal message could apply. But in this revival staged by Daniel Dooner, Flimm's prison - where and when, I'm not quite sure, though the ladies' print dresses and hairdos suggest the 1950s - has no meaningful relationships, moves and gestures to fill it which couldn't be set in any period, the odd pointed revolver excepted.It also means that Nina Stemme as Leonore, in male disguise to discover the whereabouts of her Read more ...
judith.flanders
Weeds, memorably, have been described as merely being plants that grow where we don’t want them. Walking through the Wellcome’s fine new exhibition, we can conclude that the “dirt”, too, is merely material appearing out of its appropriate location. One man’s waste is another man’s fertiliser; one civilisation’s dust-heap another’s city foundations. Children first planting a window box learn that “dirt” is alchemy: stick in a seed, out of the dirt comes dinner.The exhibition sensibly does not try to cover all aspects of the subject, but homes in on specific times and places. Opening in Read more ...
fisun.guner
The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic.Characteristically, Kiefer takes as his starting point a work of literature, references to which have been elegantly scribed in a looping hand on Read more ...
David Nice
What kind of Aida would you prefer: one in which singing actors stretched to the limits find Verdi's human volcano of emotions beneath the cod-Egyptian rubble, or a stand-and-deliver production with a stalwart cast of beaten-bronze voices? Having had a taste at least of the former once in my life, I wasn't very happy to succumb to the latter in this Covent Garden revival. It was the wall of sound in the big Act II ensemble which made me at least willing to be convinced.And then I wasn't. And then I was again. It's that kind of a show, a reminder of the bad old repertoire days at the Royal Read more ...