thu 30/01/2025

ancient Greece

Nancy Spero & Marcus Coates, Serpentine Gallery

A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from...

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Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, British Museum

I’m in an exhibition of ancient artefacts from Afghanistan, all from the National Museum at Kabul, but I may well have stumbled into the wrong room at the British Museum. I could be in the BM’s Hellenic section of Greek art, or, taking a few steps...

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A New York transformation for Edinburgh's Metamorphoses

The Blitz wartime version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that David Nice was raving about is New York-bound now, after winning one of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s most generous awards, the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award. This, set up in 2004 in...

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Semele, Théâtre de Champs-Élysées

David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story. And what brings colour to its initially...

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Atlantis: The Evidence, BBC Two

Did Atlantis really exist? Hughes’s infectious enthusiasm carried us along nicely

Here’s a question: what have the eminent Victorian statesman and four-times prime minister William Gladstone and the Nazi Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler have in common? Well, if you didn’t catch last night’s Timewatch Special, you'd probably never...

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Tom Paulin on Translating Medea

I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured...

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