tragedy
Antony and Cleopatra, RSC, Barbican review - rising grandeurWednesday, 13 December 2017
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of... Read more... |
Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, Royal Opera review - one tenor, two samey brutesMonday, 04 December 2017
Are "Cav and Pag" inseparable? Clearly not, to judge from Opera North's "Little Greats" and elsewhere, but it's still the pairing of choice. Tricky, because as music-theatre, Leoncavallo's drama of rough life entwined with rough art stands high... Read more... |
Prom 72 review: Vienna Philharmonic, Harding - uncertain Mahler Six partly redeemed by brassFriday, 08 September 2017
Outlines of a real face had begun to emerge in Daniel Harding’s conducting personality. His youthful rise to the top initially yielded neutral concerts with the LSO and a glassy, overpraised recording of Mahler’s Tenth in the Deryck Cooke completion... Read more... |
King Lear, Shakespeare's Globe - Nancy Meckler's Globe debut is unusually subduedThursday, 17 August 2017
Every play is a Brexit play. This much we have learnt in the year since the referendum. But in Nancy Meckler’s hands the Globe’s new King Lear becomes the Brexit play – an unpicking of intergenerational responsibility and difference, of philosophies... Read more... |
Hamlet, Harold Pinter Theatre review - dislocatingly fresh makeoverSaturday, 17 June 2017
Midway through Hamlet a troupe of actors arrives at Elsinore. Coaching them for his own ends, the prince turns director, delivering an impassioned critique: “O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to... Read more... |
Hamlet, Glyndebourne review - integrity if not genius in Brett Dean's scoreMonday, 12 June 2017
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of... Read more... |
Medea, Bristol Old Vic - formulaic feminism lets Greek classic downFriday, 12 May 2017
Greek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so deeply explored: the rich tapestry of archetypal family conflicts, driven by instincts that force helpless... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: LudwigThursday, 06 April 2017
No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open... Read more... |
Madama Butterfly, Royal OperaFriday, 31 March 2017
"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her. Heartbreak is what we expected from Ermonela Jaho after her... Read more... |
Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, BarbicanSaturday, 18 March 2017
It felt good to be encountering Shakespeare at his most political with a world event to smile about, for once (hailing, of course, from this brilliant Dutch company's homeland). It felt even better to emerge six hours later spellbound and deeply... Read more... |
The White Devil, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseThursday, 02 February 2017
It's no accident that when the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opened in 2014 it was with The Duchess of Malfi. This wooden womb, with its thick darkness and close-pressed audience is made for the stifling, claustrophobic horror of revenge tragedy.... Read more... |
King Lear, RSC, BarbicanFriday, 18 November 2016
At the conclusion of a year in which Britishness has come so resoundingly to the fore of the national debate – and with a play that at the time of its writing, 1605-6, was engaging with that concept no less urgently – the first impression made by... Read more... |
