Edwardian
Marianka Swain
Even the most begrudging acquaintance with thematic foghorn Downton Abbey will have affirmed that the Edwardian era heralded momentous social change. Provocatively embedding this revolution in his work was largely forgotten “New Drama” exponent St John Hankin, whose suicide Shaw described as “a public calamity”; Granville-Barker dedicated his first volume of plays to him.The Orange Tree rescued Hankin from obscurity with multiple revivals, and now Jermyn Street attempts to demonstrate why this unfamiliar name was once held in such reverence. Debuting director Joshua Stamp-Simon has selected a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When people talk about the Heroic Age of exploration, the heroes are generally agreed to be the explorers. But we’d know a great deal less about Edwardian chaps pluckily struggling through far-flung snowscapes if there weren’t images of them in situ. And the men who caught those images can be counted heroes too. Herbert Ponting pioneered cold-weather photographic techniques in Antarctica with Scott. Frank Hurley hurled himself into a freezing flooded cabin to retrieve now iconic photographic plates from Shackleton’s sinking ship Endurance. And then there is Captain John Noel.It is no Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Britain’s last castle, Drogo, may be only just over a century old, but repair work is going on in a big way – it’s currently the National Trust’s largest-scale restoration project. That provided the excuse for the Time Team special The Edwardian Grand Designer about Drogo's architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, though attention would surely have come round to him anyway this year, as the designer of World War One cemeteries and monuments, from London’s Cenotaph to the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (pictured, below right). Not to mention the creator of the visual tribute to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.Yet, just as their own series offer nuggets of mini-genius lying around on a carpet of dross, so this new offering (penned by Simon Nye) sizzled with a potential which one despaired of them ever attaining. Miller plays Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Many of the images will be all too familiar. Captain Scott writing a diary in his quarters. Three of Shackleton’s men scrubbing below decks. The Endurance lit up in the long polar night. The ice cave shaped like an italic teardrop and shot from within its chilly maw (pictured below). Penguins, dogs, seals, ponies, mostly destined for death. Chaps – above all chaps – four who famously died with Scott, many more who famously survived with Shackleton.The photographs of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley may be stencilled into the collective memory after nearly a century of over-exposure. But it’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that “everything in the world exists to end up on a postcard” is pretty courageous. But after watching the charming, gently funny Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley you begin thinking that maybe, just maybe, everything was created to be depicted on a piece of card destined to be sent through the post. Holiday camps, motorways, hills, walls - all were created to become images printed on the postcards collected by deltiologists like Ronnie Barker and Michael Winner.A deltiologist is a postcard collector. Michael Winner, who appeared here, is already well known to theartsdesk for Read more ...
fisun.guner
This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer. I didn‘t catch it last year, but I doubt this swift revival is any less captivating, nor the new cast any less sure-footed or engaging. Marcus Brigstocke has taken on the role of the gruff but loveable station master Mr Perks, whilst the three adult actors playing the children - Amy Noble as the sensible Bobby, Tim Lewis as the ever so mildly rebellious Peter and Grace Rowe as the charmingly ditzy Phyllis - bring just the right balance of earnestness and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Captain Scott's doomed 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole has become one of the enduring myths of the later British Empire, a paradigm of pluck, grit and a refusal to surrender in the teeth of hideous odds. Subsequently, some historical revisionists have reached a different conclusion, that Scott was in fact an ill-prepared amateur who committed a string of fatal errors.A new generation of splendid chaps has been revisiting the bitter, haunted wastes once trudged over and sometimes died in by our great explorers. Jasper Rees wrote majestically about James Cracknell's programme The Great Read more ...
David Nice
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old of the musical world not just to talk but to react to the works as they hear them, he may have broken new Read more ...
theartsdesk
Defying predictions that there would be no audience for a period costume drama set in an Edwardian country house, Downton Abbey has become the TV event of 2010. Episode one notched 11.6 million viewers (including repeats and ITV Player viewings), while episode two edged up to 11.8 million. The concluding episode seven threw all the cards in the air, blowing apart Mary and Matthew's romance, leaving Anna and Mr Bates dangling in limbo, and ending with the shattering news of Britain's declaration of war on Germany. There was even, briefly, a pregnancy for the fortysomething Countess of Grantham Read more ...
theartsdesk
Maggie Smith Violet, Dowager Countress of GranthamHugh Bonneville Robert, Earl of GranthamPenelope Wilton Mrs Isobel CrawleyDan Stevens Matthew CrawleyMichelle Dockery Lady Mary CrawleyTheo James Kemal PamukJim Carter Mr CarsonBrendan Coyle Mr BatesRob James-Collier ThomasThomas Howes WilliamJoanne Froggatt AnnaRose Leslie Gwen[bg|/TV/Downton_Gallery/]Four writers on theartsdesk review the whole series of Downton AbbeyWatch Downton Abbey on ITV PlayerFind Downton Abbey on Amazon
Adam Sweeting
With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen Atkins, whereas ITV has signed up Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. So far she has not been called upon to say, "A handbag?"The extended opening sequence of this 90-minute scene-setter fixed the date as April 16, 1912, and the camera rambled around the sprawling pile of Downton Abbey as the carefully delineated echelons of Read more ...