Moscow
theartsdesk Q&A: Spooks, the movieWednesday, 06 May 2015
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Cheek by Jowl/Pushkin Theatre, BarbicanFriday, 17 April 2015
Russia isn’t the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it’s surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they hope to achieve, and you won’t get a convincing answer. Moral... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: Remembering George CostakisSunday, 22 February 2015
Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: A Bewitching Eugene OneginSunday, 15 February 2015
As Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured and beloved of all Russian classics. Outside Russia, the story... Read more... |
War and Peace, BBC Radio 4Friday, 02 January 2015
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect... Read more... |
Olga Chernysheva, Pace GalleryThursday, 27 November 2014
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes.... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream (As You Like It), Dmitry Krymov Lab, BarbicanThursday, 13 November 2014
Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare’s dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and you might think we’re back more or less where we started... Read more... |
Diaghilev Festival Gala, London ColiseumMonday, 14 July 2014
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: Blood brothers on filmSunday, 06 July 2014
“We are not politicians – we are artists.” It’s the familiar cry of creatives all around the world, but it came with an added, rather surprising accent when uttered by Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) president Nikita Mikhalkov at the event... Read more... |
Uncle Vanya/Three Sisters, Wyndham's TheatreFriday, 25 April 2014
London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film and theatre director-designer Andrey Konchalovsky... Read more... |
10 Questions for Director Dmitry KrymovThursday, 17 April 2014
Dmitry Krymov (b 1954) is one of Russia’s most groundbreaking and celebrated contemporary theatre directors and set designers. Performances by his “Theatre Laboratory” are renowned for combining multimedia with art installation techniques to... Read more... |
Prince Igor, Novaya Opera, London ColiseumWednesday, 02 April 2014
Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more... Read more... |
