tue 19/03/2024

mythology

Ragnarok, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh review - moving miniature apocalypse

In terms of conveying monumental events using small-scale means, Edinburgh’s Tortoise in a Nutshell visual theatre company has form. Their 2013 Feral, for example, depicted the social breakdown of an apparently idyllic seaside town using puppetry...

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Blu-ray: Werner Herzog - Radical Dreamer

Weird, quirky Hollywood Werner can obscure the fierce visionary who warred with Kinski in the jungle. This is even true of many of his own features since moving to LA which, like his peer Wenders, usually pale next to his reverent, supernal...

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Elektra, Royal Opera review - moral: don’t wait too long for revenge

Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge...

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Daphne, Scottish Opera, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - Strauss’s translucent hymn to nature

On an Edinburgh afternoon of torrential rain close to the winter solstice, what ecstasy to be transported to an ancient Greek midsummer day, a Claude landscape with shepherds calling across the hills, painted in the most translucent colours by...

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The Mongol Khan, London Coliseum review - unique operatic spectacle utterly overwhelms flaws in pacing and story

“But that’s what they’re paying for!” replied my son as we, a little shellshocked by the previous three hours, skirted Trafalgar Square on the way home. I had reservations about some key components of the alchemy that produces great theatre, but...

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Mami Wata review – a gorgeous, strange African fable

Mami Wata is the female West African water god still worshipped in Iyi, a fragile, matriarchal village redoubt against modernity. Writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third film makes Iyi a battleground for African identity, in a glistening black-...

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The Ossianic Ballads, Edinburgh Quartet, Màiri MacMillan, National Library of Scotland review - good ingredients get lost in the mix

To coincide with the National Library of Scotland’s first bi-lingual exhibition Sguel/Story, an exhibition in English and Scottish Gaelic which celebrates stories and storytelling, the library presented a performance of newly reinterpreted Gaelic...

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Album: Rachel Sermanni - Dreamer Awake

It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already...

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Das Rheingold, Royal Opera - knotty, riveting route to destruction

Let’s set aside, to begin with, the question of the concept, other than to praise it as consistent. Most vital about this brave new Rheingold is the vindication of director Barrie Kosky’s claim that “what makes a Ring production interesting is the...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Stuntman / Beautiful Evil Things / What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed...

Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★Masculinity and violence are hot subjects for theatrical examination – and dance theatre two-hander Stuntman from Scottish company Superfan is far from the only Fringe show that investigates them this year. What...

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Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibility

Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds.So it has been with Mars, conspicuous to us Earthbound gazers as one...

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The Rhinegold, English National Opera review - tacky, edgy, brilliant

All that glitters, titular treasure included, is dangerous childsplay in Richard Jones’s third UK staging of what Wagner called the “preliminary evening” to the three main operas of The Ring of the Nibelung. It’s nothing like the previous two, for...

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